Writer Urges Internet Junkies to ‘Switch Off’ and Think
May 30th, 2011The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
Via: AFP:
Like tens of millions of others, US technology writer Nicholas Carr found the lure of the worldwide web hard to resist — until he noticed it was getting harder and harder to concentrate.
He set out his concerns in a celebrated essay headlined “Is Google making us stupid?”
And his latest book “The Shallows” explores in depth what he fears the Internet is doing to our brains.
“The seductions of technology are hard to resist,” Carr acknowledges in that book, which has sold an estimated 50,000 hardback copies in the United States alone. But he thinks it’s time to start trying.
In a speech at last week’s Seoul Digital Forum and an interview with AFP, Carr restated his concerns that IT is affecting the way people think and feel and even the physical make-up of their brains.
Every new technology in history — like the map and the clock — changed the way people think but Carr sees special dangers in the Internet.
He got his first PC back in the 1980s and was an avid net user until “a few years ago, I noticed some disturbing changes in the way my mind worked. I was losing the ability to concentrate.”
Yea…is sage advice. I go so far as to power down computers, internet routers, printers, speakers, land and cell phones, and even thrown the house master breaker off. It’s that bad sometimes. But the rewards of doing it, reading, studying…very satisfying. But some would consider that abnormal behavior I suppose. Someday I hope to invert to ratios, that is less time swimming in the man-made electromagnetic soup.