|
List Price: $26.95
Our Price: $20.95
You Save: 22%
Product Details:
Type: Hardcover
Item#: c7603
submit a review
|
|
Is the Internet making us stupid?
Mounting evidence that the Internet is eroding our ability to read or even think deeply
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
by Nicholas Carr
The benefits of using the Internet -- quick access to
loads of information, potent searching and filtering
toolds, an easy way to share opinions with a small but
interested audience -- are many and undeniable. But they
come at a price: evidence is mounting that widespread,
habitual Internet use is chipping away at our capacity for
concentration and contemplation. The more we take in
information and ideas the way the Net distributes it -- in
an endless stream of bits and bytes -- the less we're able
to read and even think deeply. What's going on? Author and
essayist Nicholas Carr argues that the tools we use to
think with -- our "intellectual technologies" -- not only
shape our habits of thought, but exert an actual physical
influence on the neurons and synapses in our brains. Now,
in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,
Carr looks at the Internet in this context, examining what
the scientific and historical evidence tells about the
effects it is having on our thoughts, memories, and even
emotions -- and how different its effects are from those
exerted by earlier intellectual technologies such as the
printed book.
(continued from above)
Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and
history, The Shallows explains how the Net is literally
rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of
the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen
watcher. For centuries, the printed book served to focus
our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In
contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted
sampling of small bits of information from many sources.
The more we use it as an appendage of memory,
neuroscientific research shows, the less we remember, and
the more we use it as an aide to thinking, the less we
think.
The most penetrating exploration of the Internet's
intellectual and cultural consequences yet published, The
Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media
and our minds.
"The most important topic in contemporary culture"
"Carr carefully examines the most important topic in
contemporary culture -- the mental and social transformation
created by our new electronic environment. Without ever
losing sight of the larger questions at stake, he calmly
demolishes the clichés that have dominated discussions
about the Internet. Witty, ambitious, and immensely
readable, The Shallows actually manages to describe the
weird, new, artificial world in which we now live." -- Dana
Gioia, poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment
for the Arts
"The core of education is this: developing the
capacity to concentrate. The fruits of this capacity we
call civilization. But all that is finished, perhaps.
Welcome to the shallows, where the un-educating of homo
sapiens begins. Nicholas Carr does a wonderful job
synthesizing the recent cognitive research. In doing so, he
gently refutes the ideologists of progress, and shows what
is really at stake in the daily habits of our wired lives:
the re-constitution of our minds." -- Matthew B. Crawford,
author of Shop Class As Soulcraft
"Ultimately, The Shallows is a book about the
preservation of the human capacity for contemplation and
wisdom, in an epoch where both appear increasingly
threatened. Nick Carr provides a thought-provoking and
intellectually courageous account of how the medium of the
Internet is changing the way we think now and how future
generations will or will not think. Few works could be more
important." -- Maryanne Wolf, Tufts University Center for
Reading and Language Research
"Carr's analysis incorporates a wealth of neuroscience
and other research, as well as philosophy, science, history
and cultural developments ... His fantastic investigation
of the effect of the Internet on our neurological selves
concludes with a very humanistic petition for balancing our
human and computer interactions ... Highly recommended." -- Library Journal
|
|
Continue the review below...
