Nicholas Carr's book _The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains_ grew out of an article that appeared in The Atlantic in July 2008: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
Google is only used as an attention-getter, but he raises some valid points...people thought that print was going to ruin our ability to remember and think because we put info in books to be looked up later. Nietzsche's use of the typewriter turned his already aphoristic style even more blunt/terse.
I have my students read the article and pull it apart before we watch the PBS Frontline special "Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier" because it (social media/the Internet) is something that impacts their lives daily, and is worth investigating because we simply do not know yet how our brains are going to evolve to handle the flood of data in which we're drowning. Or maybe it's us fogies who are struggling to keep our heads above water--the kids, as the Who once posited, may be all right. We just don't know.
Carr's book put the last nail in the coffin of my online teaching. I will do it for another year or so, and maybe scaled down after that. But I am making my bid to get back into the live classroom and, so far, I am on schedule. I am already spending MUCH less time online and I already feel palpably happier, calmer and more focused than a year ago. The new digital culture won't be all negative. And I am somewhat at home in it. But I am mostly a part of the text culture, that 500 year transitional period that may now be coming to an end. That is where my center of gravity is shifting back to and I suspect that is where I will stay.
Umm... Is it just me, or is anyone else taken aback at an infographic full of little factoids and images making an argument about the dangers of little factoids mixed with images? Perhaps it's the only way to reach an audience with twitter-shortened attention spans, but still...
when did "assisted living today" become an academic source for info? also, their sources were lame; the links were broken and none of them, that i could see, were scientifically relevant. intuitively, i agree though.
"when did "assisted living today" become an academic source for info?"
I'd rather be watching "Assisted Living Dracula", that is, if it wasn't just a cheap joke on Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
I was always afraid that SOMETHING would come along with the brain-enspazzulating power of the "blipverts" on the old "Max Headroom," and the Internet didn't let me down.
Isn't it ironic, that when machines do much of our thinking for us, it -doesn't- make us smarter? I told a student that calculators became commercially available only at Christmas of 1972, two weeks after Apollo 17, the last expedition to the Moon. My student was flabbergasted: "How the they DO it?", he sputtered. I told him: "They used their brains."
That said, if I were to ban calculators in any of my classes, I'd get lynched.
Nicholas Carr's book _The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains_ grew out of an article that appeared in The Atlantic in July 2008: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
ReplyDeleteGoogle is only used as an attention-getter, but he raises some valid points...people thought that print was going to ruin our ability to remember and think because we put info in books to be looked up later. Nietzsche's use of the typewriter turned his already aphoristic style even more blunt/terse.
I have my students read the article and pull it apart before we watch the PBS Frontline special "Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier" because it (social media/the Internet) is something that impacts their lives daily, and is worth investigating because we simply do not know yet how our brains are going to evolve to handle the flood of data in which we're drowning. Or maybe it's us fogies who are struggling to keep our heads above water--the kids, as the Who once posited, may be all right. We just don't know.
And now back to my bottle of Pinot.
Carr's book put the last nail in the coffin of my online teaching. I will do it for another year or so, and maybe scaled down after that. But I am making my bid to get back into the live classroom and, so far, I am on schedule. I am already spending MUCH less time online and I already feel palpably happier, calmer and more focused than a year ago. The new digital culture won't be all negative. And I am somewhat at home in it. But I am mostly a part of the text culture, that 500 year transitional period that may now be coming to an end. That is where my center of gravity is shifting back to and I suspect that is where I will stay.
ReplyDeletetl:dr
ReplyDelete(just kidding)
Umm... Is it just me, or is anyone else taken aback at an infographic full of little factoids and images making an argument about the dangers of little factoids mixed with images? Perhaps it's the only way to reach an audience with twitter-shortened attention spans, but still...
ReplyDelete@R&G: My thought exactly! I felt a little frenzied after reading the whole thing.
ReplyDeletewhen did "assisted living today" become an academic source for info? also, their sources were lame; the links were broken and none of them, that i could see, were scientifically relevant. intuitively, i agree though.
ReplyDelete"when did "assisted living today" become an academic source for info?"
ReplyDeleteI'd rather be watching "Assisted Living Dracula", that is, if it wasn't just a cheap joke on Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
I was always afraid that SOMETHING would come along with the brain-enspazzulating power of the "blipverts" on the old "Max Headroom," and the Internet didn't let me down.
Isn't it ironic, that when machines do much of our thinking for us, it -doesn't- make us smarter? I told a student that calculators became commercially available only at Christmas of 1972, two weeks after Apollo 17, the last expedition to the Moon. My student was flabbergasted: "How the they DO it?", he sputtered. I told him: "They used their brains."
ReplyDeleteThat said, if I were to ban calculators in any of my classes, I'd get lynched.