So I’m head-over-heels in love with The Shallows, but I’ll try to put that aside and look for some passages that I don’t just heap praise on. Because, in all honesty, this is the first book I’ve actually highlighted and enjoyed it.
Passage #1: “But the news is not all good…the more difficult it becomes to turn back.” (34-35).
Passage #2: “To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought…It was a literary brain.” (64-65).
The experience that I have had reading this book is honestly unlike any other book that I have read in the last several years. Picking individual passages to highlight wasn’t easy, I found so many of them rich with connotations. However, as per the requirements, I selected two different passages from the first section of required reading. The first passage is filled with powerful, bold statements like “the possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains.” Carr attacks our human pride and forces us to accept the fact that as a species, we are still prone to making bad decisions. We inherently think that the human race is smart enough to realize all of its mistakes. Carr says not so fast- we are subject to bad decision-making as a species, too.
The second passage captured the essence of the book’s effect on the human mind in a mere page. In it, Carr claims that book reading was an “unnatural” process of thought, an “anomaly.” While I see his point, I wonder why humanity would ever make an “unnatural” switch? Surely, if the pros seemed outweighed by the cons, we should have left reading behind? It is hard for me to convince myself reading’s unnatural. Maybe it is because I’ve grown up surrounded by books and academia. I’m not sure. If the switch to reading was unnatural, why did we make it, and if it is indeed unnatural, why did we stick with it for centuries? There must have been some sort of transitional period where people’s brains were in between the scattered mind and the literary mind. I wonder if there was a conflict of interest or some sort of internal tug-of-war going on.
I think you’ve introduced a vey interesting concept. Most of us grow up reading, so it seems to be completely natural. But if you think about it, we have to go to school to learn how to read so it’s not completely intuitive. Although now we get most of our information from reading, if you think about it there are many other ways to receive it–seeing, hearing, experiencing events, and so on and so forth. And before the creation of writing or a real alphabet for that matter, people got ALL of their information from spoken word or from experience, so perhaps that is the more “natural” way of being connected with world. So maybe one day humans will go back to a more intuitive way of getting information.