The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
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The bestselling author of The Big Switch returns with an explosive look at technology's effect on the mind."Is Google making us stupid?" When Nicholas Carr posed that question in an Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: as we enjoy the Internet's bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration yet published of the Internet's intellectual and cultural consequences. Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and history into a rich narrative, The Shallows explains how the Internet is rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen watcher... The Barnes & Noble Review Usually, I call this kind of doomy pronouncement "geezer talk," because it's what old people tend to indulge in as they fail to face -- and instead displace -- their own fears of death onto the state of the world as a whole. My parents did, yours probably did -- or do -- too. Not that Mr. Carr is old. He's about fifty, a former editor of the Harvard Business Review whose previous, comparatively neutral attitude toward the technological revolution seems now to have given way to the values of his still earlier incarnation as a Harvard MA in English and American Literature and Language. Because in The Shallows, he clearly and deeply values creative, literary, and philosophical endeavor above all others; he worries about their future, and proves, to my satisfaction anyway, that he is right to worry. This book is not geezer talk, then -- it's required reading for anyone who wants a cogent, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched statement of the techno-fears that, in however inchoate a way, many of us have harbored for going on a few decades now.
PrologueThe Watchdog and the Thief 1One Hal and Me 5Two The Vital Paths 17a digression on what the brain thinks about when it thinks about itself 36Three Tools of the Mind 39Four The Deepening Page 58a digression on lee de forest and his amazing audion 78Five A Medium of the Most General Nature 81Six The Very Image of a Book 99Seven The Juggler's Brain 115a degression on the buoyancy of IQ scores 144Eight The Church of Google 149Nine Search, Memeory 177a digression on the writing of this book 198Ten A Thing Like me 201Epilogue Human Elements 223Notes 225Further Reading 253Acknowledgments 257Index 259
