Is the Internet making us stupid? In this new book, as incendiary as it is important, Nicholas Carr argues that the Internet is changing dramatically how we think, remember and interact.
0: THE WATCHDOG AND THE THIEF 1: HAL AND ME 2: THE VITAL PATHS 3: TOOLS OF THE MIND 4: THE DEEPENING PAGE 5: A MEDIUM OF THE MOST GENERAL NATURE 6: THE VERY IMAGE OF A BOOK 7: THE JUGGLER'S BRAIN 8: THE CHURCH OF GOOGLE 9: SEARCH, MEMORY 10: A THING LIKE ME 11: HUMAN ELEMENTS
Nicholas Carr is the author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. He contributes to the New York Times, Guardian, Financial Times and Wired. He was formerly the executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, where he specialised in editing and writing articles on business strategy, information technology, and the Internet.
In his new book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr has written a Silent
Spring for the literary mind.--Michael Agger
The subtitle of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is
Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition
of those published in the 1950s about how rock ’n’ roll was
corrupting the nation’s youth ... But this is no such book. It is a
patient and rewarding popularization of some of the research being
done at the frontiers of brain science ... Mild-mannered, never
polemical, with nothing of the Luddite about him, Carr makes his
points with a lot of apt citations and wide-ranging
erudition.--Christopher Caldwell
If you retain any residual aspirations for literary repartee,
prefer the smell of a book to a mouse and, most important, enjoy
the quiet meanderings within your own mind that can be triggered by
a good bit of prose, you are the person to whom Nicholas Carr has
addressed his riveting new book.--Robert Burton
The Shallows isn’t McLuhan’s Understanding Media, but the curiosity
rather than trepidation with which Carr reports on the effects of
online culture pulls him well into line with his predecessor . . .
Carr’s ability to crosscut between cognitive studies involving
monkeys and eerily prescient prefigurations of the modern computer
opens a line of inquiry into the relationship between human and
technology.--Ellen Wernecke,
The subtitle of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is
Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition
of those published in the 1950s about how rock 'n' roll was
corrupting the nation's youth ... But this is no such book. It is a
patient and rewarding popularization of some of the research being
done at the frontiers of brain science ... Mild-mannered, never
polemical, with nothing of the Luddite about him, Carr makes his
points with a lot of apt citations and wide-ranging
erudition.--Christopher Caldwell
The Shallows isn't McLuhan's Understanding Media, but the curiosity
rather than trepidation with which Carr reports on the effects of
online culture pulls him well into line with his predecessor . . .
Carr's ability to crosscut between cognitive studies involving
monkeys and eerily prescient prefigurations of the modern computer
opens a line of inquiry into the relationship between human and
technology. --Ellen Wernecke,
The subtitle of Nicholas Carr 's The Shallows: What the Internet is
Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition
of those published in the 1950s about how rock n roll was
corrupting the nation 's youth ... But this is no such book. It is
a patient and rewarding popularization of some of the research
being done at the frontiers of brain science ... Mild-mannered,
never polemical, with nothing of the Luddite about him, Carr makes
his points with a lot of apt citations and wide-ranging erudition.
--Christopher Caldwell
A thought provoking exploration of the Internet 's physical and
cultural consequences, rendering highly technical material
intelligible to the general reader. --The 2011 Pulitzer Prize
Committee
The Shallows certainly isn't the first examination of this subject,
but it's more lucid, concise and pertinent than similar works ...
An essential, accessible dispatch about how we think now. --Laura
Miller"
A must-read for any desk jockey concerned about the Web s
deleterious effects on the mind. "
Persuasive ... A prolific blogger, tech pundit, and author, [Carr]
cites enough academic research in The Shallows to give anyone pause
about society's full embrace of the Internet as an unadulterated
force for progress . . . Carr lays out, in engaging, accessible
prose, the science that may explain these results. --Peter
Burrows"
Another reason for book lovers not to throw in the towel quite yet
is The Shallows...a quietly eloquent retort to those who claim that
digital culture is harmless who claim, in fact, that we're getting
smarter by the minute just because we can plug in a computer and
allow ourselves to get lost in the funhouse of endless hyperlinks.
--Julia Keller"
The subtitle of Nicholas Carr s The Shallows: What the Internet is
Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition
of those published in the 1950s about how rock n roll was
corrupting the nation s youth ... But this is no such book. It is a
patient and rewarding popularization of some of the research being
done at the frontiers of brain science ... Mild-mannered, never
polemical, with nothing of the Luddite about him, Carr makes his
points with a lot of apt citations and wide-ranging erudition.
--Christopher Caldwell"
Starred Review. Carr provides a deep, enlightening examination of
how the Internet influences the brain and its neural pathways. 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. "
You really should read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows . . . Far from
offering a series of rants on the dangers of new media, Carr spends
chapters walking us through a variety of historical experiments and
laymen's explanations on the workings of the brain . . . He makes
the research stand on end, punctuating it with pithy conclusions
and clever phrasing. --Fritz Nelson"
The Shallows isn t McLuhan s Understanding Media, but the curiosity
rather than trepidation with which Carr reports on the effects of
online culture pulls him well into line with his predecessor . . .
Carr s ability to crosscut between cognitive studies involving
monkeys and eerily prescient prefigurations of the modern computer
opens a line of inquiry into the relationship between human and
technology. --Ellen Wernecke,"
Absorbing [and] disturbing. We all joke about how the Internet is
turning us, and especially our kids, into fast-twitch airheads
incapable of profound cogitation. It's no joke, Mr. Carr insists,
and he has me persuaded. --John Horgan"
The best book I read last year and by best I really just mean the
book that made the strongest impression on me was The Shallows, by
Nicholas Carr. Like most people, I had some strong intuitions about
how my life and the world have been changing in response to the
Internet. But I could neither put those intuitions into an
argument, nor be sure that they had any basis in the first place.
Carr persuasively and with great subtlety and beauty makes the case
that it is not only the content of our thoughts that are radically
altered by phones and computers, but the structure of our brains
our ability to have certain kinds of thoughts and experiences. And
the kinds of thoughts and experiences at stake are those that have
defined our humanity. Carr is not a proselytizer, and he is no
techno-troglodyte. He is a profoundly sharp thinker and writer
equal parts journalist, psychologist, popular science writer, and
philosopher. I have not only given this book to numerous friends, I
actually changed my life in response to it. --Jonathan Safran
Foer"
This is a lovely story well told an ode to a quieter, less frenetic
time when reading was more than skimming and thought was more than
mere recitation. "
This is a measured manifesto. Even as Carr bemoans his vanishing
attention span, he s careful to note the usefulness of the
Internet, which provides us with access to a near infinitude of
information. We might be consigned to the intellectual shallows,
but these shallows are as wide as a vast ocean. --Jonah Lehrer"
A thought provoking exploration of the Internet s physical and
cultural consequences, rendering highly technical material
intelligible to the general reader. --The 2011 Pulitzer Prize
Committee"
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. What emerges for the reader,
inexorably, is the suspicion that we have well and truly screwed
ourselves. --Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class As
Soulcraft"
Nicholas 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 cliches 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"
Neither a tub-thumpingly alarmist jeremiad nor a breathlessly
Panglossian ode to the digital self, Nicholas Carr s The Shallows
is a deeply thoughtful, surprising exploration of our frenzied
psyches in the age of the Internet. Whether you do it in pixels or
pages, read this book. --Tom Vanderbilt, author, Traffic: Why We
Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)"
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, author of Proust and the Squid: The
Story and Science of the Reading Brain"
Nicholas Carr has written an important and timely book. See if you
can stay off the web long enough to read it! --Elizabeth Kolbert,
author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate
Change"
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