It's a topic which won't go away. Is the internet dumbing us all down, making us mentally lazy or simply cluttering our minds?
Two sources, by coincidence, look at the situation - in part, triggered by a new book What the Internet is Doing to Our Minds.
From The New York Times:
"Carr’s most serious charge against the Internet has nothing to do with Google and its endless sprawl of hyperlinks. Instead, he’s horrified by the way computers are destroying our powers of concentration. As the blogger Cory Doctorow, a co-editor of the wildly popular Web site Boing Boing, has observed, the typical electronic screen is an “ecosystem of interruption technologies,” encouraging us to peek at our e-mail in-box, glance at Twitter and waste away the day on eBay. And so we lurch from site to site, if only because we constantly crave the fleeting pleasure of new information. But this isn’t really the fault of the Internet. The online world has merely exposed the feebleness of human attention, which is so weak that even the most minor temptations are all but impossible to resist."
Over at NPR:
"Carr is the author of the Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? which he has expanded into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption — and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and he says there's not much of that to be found online.
Carr started research for The Shallows after he noticed a change in his own ability to concentrate.
"I'd sit down with a book, or a long article," he tells NPR's Robert Siegel, "and after a couple of pages my brain wanted to do what it does when I'm online: check e-mail, click on links, do some Googling, hop from page to page."
This chronic state of distraction "follows us" Carr argues, long after we shut down our computers.
"Neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that, even as adults, our brains are very plastic," Carr explains. "They're very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning ... the more adept we become at that mode of thinking."
Two sources, by coincidence, look at the situation - in part, triggered by a new book What the Internet is Doing to Our Minds.
From The New York Times:
"Carr’s most serious charge against the Internet has nothing to do with Google and its endless sprawl of hyperlinks. Instead, he’s horrified by the way computers are destroying our powers of concentration. As the blogger Cory Doctorow, a co-editor of the wildly popular Web site Boing Boing, has observed, the typical electronic screen is an “ecosystem of interruption technologies,” encouraging us to peek at our e-mail in-box, glance at Twitter and waste away the day on eBay. And so we lurch from site to site, if only because we constantly crave the fleeting pleasure of new information. But this isn’t really the fault of the Internet. The online world has merely exposed the feebleness of human attention, which is so weak that even the most minor temptations are all but impossible to resist."
Over at NPR:
"Carr is the author of the Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? which he has expanded into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption — and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and he says there's not much of that to be found online.
Carr started research for The Shallows after he noticed a change in his own ability to concentrate.
"I'd sit down with a book, or a long article," he tells NPR's Robert Siegel, "and after a couple of pages my brain wanted to do what it does when I'm online: check e-mail, click on links, do some Googling, hop from page to page."
This chronic state of distraction "follows us" Carr argues, long after we shut down our computers.
"Neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that, even as adults, our brains are very plastic," Carr explains. "They're very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning ... the more adept we become at that mode of thinking."
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