It's refreshing because it looks at one of those moral-panicky books and does a nice reasonably balanced crit:
"Yet how similar are a clock and the internet? The former is a tool; the latter is more like a new dimension in public life. It is a trap fallen into by the Spectator 120 years earlier, when it conflated the telegraph—the tool—with the electricity that powered it. While the telegraph may have shortened attention spans, this judgement needed to be balanced against the many positive effects of electricity on public life—from electric lights in libraries, to the cinema, to spreading knowledge across the globe. The intellectual effects of a new technology must be judged on what it does to social organisation, not just on how it affects our brains. Carr’s argument implies that something drastic must be done about the internet, but glosses over the obvious objection that “shallower” individuals may be the price to pay for a deeper public discourse."And so it goes on; have a look. This may go on a reading list for our 'Virtual Worlds' module.
3 comments:
I read a long extract from 'The Shallows' and then an interview with Carr several weeks ago and found it fascinating. I think he makes a fair point that, although the article you link to nicely points out that it is not a guaranteed future, the way that those who control major sites have a financial gain to make from keeping users on their sites but serving different pages in order to maximise potential advertising revenue means that it is *unlikely* that deep reading will be allowed to become the norm.
His analysis of the way we read web pages (F shaped) and the effect this has on our ability to read offline is also worth investigating.
It seemed to me that the Prospect article had a very positivist view of the web, even as a tool for genuine social mobility, which to me seemed hopeful rather than realistic.
My biggest personal concern with the Prospect article is the contention that 'shallower' individuals are the price for deeper public discourse - surely the discourse is broader, but not deeper. Clever rhetoric but not very plausible. Instead, 'shallower' individuals are more likely to create a shallower discourse, which although breadth may be great and act as a partial counterbalance to shallowness, surely cannot compare with a broad
and deep discourse. Carr (in that which I have read) is not anti-internet, but anti the current state and form of it. If truly deep and broad discourse is to take place then surely what is needed is both deep reading and the breadth of the internet.
Two interesting sides of a debate - The Shallows is on my 'To Buy' list!
My take on the history of cultural artefacts/technologies is pretty much the one that I take Marshall McLuhan to have had: that each technology represents an extension to the human body and therefore has capability to enable and disable to varying degrees the different capacities of human beings. Our job is to assess both the enablements and the disablements and to strategise accordingly. The trick for Christians is to do so without falling into the pitfalls of the neo-phobic or of the neo-philic and to holdi the line for 'humane' technology which serves rather than dominates human well-being and Christian mission (as such it is a cognate of our relationship to the Powers).
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