For ENG2150H this semester, we were instructed to read Nicholas Carr’s intellectually challenging book The Shallows. It discusses how the Internet is affecting our brains and our thought processes. It is a book that reveals how our brain works, how reading and literature affected our brains, and now how the INternet and information technology is affecting it and transforming it.
After reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, I found several concepts to be particularly enthralling. One of the concepts that caught my attention was the effectiveness of multimedia as compared to single-media. The Shallows argues that people do not thrive on multiple forms of media at once, rather, focusing on one type of media allows better retaining of information. This interests me because everything that we do now has been geared towards consuming more and more media. If it’s not TV, it’s internet, or radio, or audio files, or print, or interactive media, etc.
I find this ties into the general question of whether or not “less is more” in the case of information. Is a little bit from a lot of sources better than a lot from a couple of sources? I want to hone this question in a lot, right now I feel that it is still too vague. But the idea that one at a time might be better than all at once definitely interests me.
So I think the point that you’re trying to make is that multimedia is actually harmful to us, yet we are still using it more and more? Based on your Blog’s title, it sounds as though you’re interested in why we still try to consume more and more media, even though it’s been proven to be harmful to us individually and as a species.
Are you planning on first exploring why humans crave what’s bad for them, and then applying it specifically to technology? Because that would be cool. But if instead you’re just saying in general about how we’re trying to outsource more and more of what we do to different kinds of technologies, then that’s ok too.
I like that you have links to different diagrams and such, maybe you can put in some more and also hyperlink them so they link directly to the sites?
Um…besides for that I like the layout of your blog and I think that you bring up some interesting ideas from The Shallows. I can’t wait to see how you’ll reconfigure them to create your own spin-off idea.
Good Luck!
-pg