Internet Impacts Internationally

The Shallows

Our focus on a medium’s content can blind us to these deep effects. We’re too busy being dazzled or disturbed by the programming to notice what’s going on inside our heads. In the end, we come to pretend that the technology itself doesn’t matter. It’s how we use it that matters, we tell ourselves. The implication, comforting in its hubris, is that we’re in control. The technology is just a tool, inert until we pick it up and inert again once we set it aside. – pg. 3

 

This paragraph was a very explicit excerpt of what he is going to continue elaborating on in the following two chapters. This got me somewhat upset. It was as if this author dumped everybody into the same boat and made the sweeping statement that we as a species are desensitized by man-made technology. We end up sounding like individuals in denial who can’t see that we are blinded as he says we are by the medium’s programming. He calls his readers prideful, which actually irritated me. However, when I realized I was irritated, I began to think more deeply about his argument, which to me was a clear sign of how good of a writer Nicolas Carr is. The thing I noticed about his examples following this passage was that all of the people he chose to mention were highly literate. Obviously, when you use the epitome of a certain group, you would get somewhat exaggerated results. Noticing that people who used to read hours on end have read less and become less capable of maintaining stamina is a simple conclusion to make. I would argue that the average American who grew up using the internet, someone who has always read pages of articles online, don’t lose reading focus, and is just as capable of straight thinking as a person who’s never been “blinded” by our technological medium.

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In a purely oral culture… writing heightens consciousness. – pg. 56-57

 

Nicolas Carr’s statements in these three paragraphs seemed rooted in the analysis of writing from a highly Romantic language based culture. Perhaps it is prideful of me to say, but I personally don’t believe ancient Chinese culture supports Carr’s argument that somehow the human mind is able to maintain only a limited amount. The thought that knowledge is embedded in poetry, and therefore the less you can recall the less knowledge you truly have bothers me. I know that Chinese characters and the overall Chinese language are proven more difficult to learn than English or any European language. There are multiple tones to the same composition of words, and once these words were written down, they weren’t suddenly lost from our minds. It is too extreme to simply state, “But intellectually, our ancestors’ oral culture was in many ways a shallower one than our own.” Though I am glad to be in this modern culture, I don’t appreciate the sweeping statements minimizing the intellect of my predecessors.