I was very confused when Nicholas Carr started off his book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, with:
“I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article…The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle (5-6).”
He goes on and on about how difficult it has become for most people to read large chunks of text, yet here is writing a full-length book! How did he even manage to read his manuscript if it’s so difficult for him to concentrate? Obviously he has enough hope in people’s continued interest in reading full-length books for him to hazard writing a book himself.
Although this struck me as rather ironic, I did enjoy reading what Carr has to say. I was particularly intrigued by his chapter on Google, which gave a visitor to the Google headquarters’s impression that:
“The coziness [was] overwhelming…unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to Earth, what place would be better to hide? (174)”
This phrasing of something innately “evil” and “dark” and “Satanic” going on at Google struck me as odd. What’s so frightening about some computer geeks trying to crack algorithms? Surely what he saw was completely nonthreatening. So why did he feel such an immediate revulsion at machines being programmed to anticipate human thoughts? This led to me to wonder about the ever-present technophobia which is propagated in books and movies. Why does it exist? Shouldn’t we rejoice in having to do less work ourselves?
I hope to explore the root of our fear and prove that it really stems from natural human fears and that we have nothing to be scared of as a race. It’s not that machines will dominate us, we’re just directing our inherent anxieties towards them.
I thin kyour interest in fear has a lot of potential. You know: what do our common social fears–the ghost stories we tell–reveal about us as a culture and a generation. So for instance, Poe wrote a lot about being trapped in tombs in the wall or floor, small, tight, confining spaces, being buried alive–being isolated & cut off to a terrifying extreme. So I wonder: what did this theme in his horror stories say about early to mid 19th c. America? What does the current popularity of zombies and vampires say about us in the early 21st century? And what does some specific fear of technology (that it will make us stupid) really MEAN, what does it say about what scares us today? And why does this scare us today? Some interesting potential in there.
This is a great topic! I feel like it has a lot to do with fear of things we can’t explain. For the average Joe, the technology behind Google or other advanced software is a mystery, especially when it can anticipate what they’re thinking. Looking at it from that perspective can be pretty terrifying. At the same time, I agree with you in that we should be thankful for technology and the benefits we receive from it. It definitely saves us a lot of time and effort in out daily lives.