Thesis For The Shallows

Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

He’s thinking about it. The book, The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr is a very interesting piece of writing. A book that is supposed to be directed to what the ‘internet doing to our brains’ takes a lot of turns in other directions. The most apparent idea from the book, is that new things are damaging to our minds. Dating all the way back to the printing press, “innovation”, has been slowly hurting the way we live. Today’s innovation is the internet, and the internet is proving to be just the same. Carr says that the attentiveness, thoughtfulness, and socialization of modern day society, or rather the lack of, is to the blame of the internet. Although Carr creates a strong argument, and does nothing but continually back up his thesis with good facts, but it is his actual thesis that I disagree with. Carr constantly states historical and scientific facts that show how the internet is following a path from the past. Very similar to what Ronald Wright was talking about in his book, A Short History of Progress . In Wright’s book, he talks about how the world is becoming more and more unaware that we are creating the same mistakes as we have in the past, and that the world is physically falling apart. Carr on the

I was interested the entire time, which is remarkable for me. The only problem I had was that the book made me feel a little bit uneasy. As stated before, there were lots of times that Carr was really close to switching sides, but at the last minute he would find some quote about an ancient monk reciting poetry and he would keep his stance. The entire book almost seemed as though Carr was trying to convince himself that the internet was actually good for society. As if physically writing the book was his way of not only researching the negative, but also trying to understand the