Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
It’s the smell I remember.
When my older sister was in high school she got a summer job at the local bookstore in the center of our town. It was only about a mile from home, so I would sometimes walk or ride my bike there to visit her. I tried not to interrupt her professional duties too much. It was there that I first learned to browse.
Continue reading “It’s the Smell I Remember”
People like Jesus. They don’t like Christians. Why is that?
It’s no surprise people like Jesus. He loved children, opposed legalism, stood up for outcasts, healed the sick, comforted the weak, preached the good news to the poor.
But why would so many people not like the people who follow him? Aren’t Christians supposed to be like Jesus, to be Christ-like, literally, “little Christs”? Shouldn’t Christians be known for their compassion, their wisdom, their love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control?
Continue reading “Uncommon Decency”
The book, as Nicholas Carr notes in The Shallows, has so far proven extraordinarily resistant to computers and the Net. While book sales and book reading have plateaued, this “long sequence of printed pages assembled between a pair of stiff covers has proven to be a remarkably robust technology for more than half a millennium” (p. 99). But what about now?
Continue reading “The Shallows 8: The Future of the Book”
If we had no clocks, no time-keeping devices of any kind, what would happen? How would we know when to get to the airport? When would plays and sporting events start? For that matter, when would a basketball game end? How would lawyers know what to charge? What would the “timing belt” in my car keep track of?
If we had no clocks, society as we know it would collapse. Society might return to a more agrarian, more relational, more community-minded, more nature-conscious state–but our
productivity would most definitely drop. Something would be lost and something gained. As Nicholas Carr writes in The Shallows, “Every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities.” (p. 209).
Continue reading “The Shallows 7: The Computer’s Dream”
Something’s gained: Everything is on the web. It’s an external hard drive for the brain, relieving us of the responsibility to remember mindless lists of facts or extended passages of literature. We free up our brain power so we can do other, more important things.
Something’s lost: Because of the way the brain works, when we cease exercising our memory, we don’t merely lose isolated bits of information. We actually lose the ability to gain insight and understanding.
Continue reading “The Shallows 6: Try to Remember”
Over a hundred years ago [Frederick Winslow Taylor](http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/fwt/taylor.html) took a stopwatch to a steel plant in Philadelphia and changed the industrial world. By timing every step and movement in the process he came up with the one, most efficient way each worker should work. Productivity exploded, and manufacturers across the country eagerly adopted his methods. Taylor saw humans as extensions of the machine.
In [*The Shallows*](http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393072223/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1282160698&sr=1-1), Nicholas Carr contends that “Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters—the Googleplex—is the internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism” (p. 150). But at Google humans are extensions of a very particular kind of machine—the computer.
Continue reading “The Shallows 5: Google’s Narrow Vision”
The Net distracts. But not all distractions are bad. As I’ve written here before, taking a break from a problem and letting your brain do something totally different can provide an opportunity for fresh ideas to emerge. The problem is that the constantly distracting state of the Net, contends Nicholas Carr in The Shallows, changes the way we read and think. (You can find the first in my series on this book here.)
Continue reading “The Shallows 4: The Net Effect”
When the Net first hit big in the mid-1990s, I would tell others, “This is a good thing. People are doing a lot more reading now. Teens are not just playing video games on their computers. Anything that encourages reading is for the good.” Now, especially having read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (see here and here), I’m not so sure.
Continue reading “The Shallows 3: Driven to Distraction”
In Phaedrus, Socrates muses on the merits of writing. Surprisingly to our minds, he is skeptical. Why? It is a recipe for forgetfulness. We won’t have to exercise our memories anymore. Knowledge of a subject, after all, is much more valuable than a written account of the same thing. The only virtue of writing was as a guard against the forgetfulness of old age.
So Nicholas Carr, in The Shallows, introduces us to the first Luddite in his book on how the Internet changes our brains. (See part one of my review [here](http://andyunedited.ivpress.com/2010/08/the_shallows_1.php#more).) In chapter four he offers a fascinating overview of the history of the written word and how each change created changes in us and in society.
Continue reading “The Shallows 2: A Brief History of Reading”
Nicholas Carr made a splash with his Atlantic cover story “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which I discussed here. Now in The Shallows he brings a full-length book to bear on the question, and it’s a dandy.
The subtitle, “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” is very descriptive. In this serial review, I’ll touch on some of the evidence he offers, a mix of anecdotal and scientific.
Continue reading “The Shallows 1: A Change of Mind”