Read Nicholas Carr's book THE SHALLOWS, Chapters 6-8.
Then, at our COURSE blog, reflect on the following:
1. Discuss THREE specific observations Carr makes in EACH chapter. Use 2-3 sentences for each observation, and combine his quoted observations with an IYOW analysis.
2. Ask ONE specific question of Carr, after reading all 3 chapters.
Chapter Six:
ReplyDelete- Carr discusses Amazon's Kindle, and quotes Jacob Weisberg, who described the Kindle as "a machine that marks a cultural revolution" in which "reading and printing are getting separated," which is a strange concept. Electronic devices such as the Kindle are going to eventually make books obsolete.
- In 2001, Japanese women began writing stories on their cellphones and uploading them to the web in a series of text messages. They became popular because, as one of the "novelists" explained, "[People] don't read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them." Fortunately this fad hasn't left Japan, but it's disconcerting that it became such a trend in the first place.
- Possibly the biggest difference between printed text and electronic text is that "In the digital marketplace, publication becomes an ongoing process rather than a discrete event, and revision can go on indefinitely." This means that if we eventually completely switch over to electronic text and books become obsolete, a novel could potentially continue to be revised over and over again forever, rather than remaining a static collection of pages such as the books we are used to.
Chapter Seven:
- The paradox of the Net that will have the greatest long-term effect on us is that "the Net seizes our attention, only to scatter it." Even though we are deeply focused on the medium itself, there is so much to see, hear, and read so quickly that our attention is scattered in a million different directions within the medium.
- Distractedness isn't always bad: researcher Ap Dijksterhuis "indicates that such breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple with a problem, bringing to bear information and cognitive processes unavailable to conscious deliberation." However, his work also indicates that if we don't acknowledge a problem directly with our conscious mind, this same event doesn't occur, and with the way our minds work due to using the Net, this is the case.
- With new technology, we are both gaining and losing at the same time. Gary Small backs up Merzenich's belief that the Net changes the brain with scientific evidence. According to him, "The daily use of computers, smart phones, search engines, and other such tools 'stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening old ones.'"
Chapter Eight:
- Google carries out thousands of experiments every day using the behavioral data it collects from its own search engine and other sites. It uses the results to "refine the algorithms that increasingly guide how all of us find information and extract meaning from it."
- Larry Page figured out that links can be compared to citations in a paper. The more citations a paper has, the more credible it becomes in its field. Page reasoned that the same is true for Web links, and thus this became the foundation for Google.
- Carr reasons that there needs to be a balance in the way we learn. He gives an example of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the beginning of this part of the chapter and juxtaposes the idea of Hawthorne contemplating alone in a peaceful garden with the "rapid discovery and retrieval of information." Carr states that "The development of a well-rounded mind requires both an ability to find and quickly parse a wide range of information and a capacity for open-ended reflection. There needs to be time for efficient data collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine and time so it idly in the garden."
Question: How do you feel about the way reading and writing are shifting in our society? What do you think it will mean for us in the future?
Chapter 6:
ReplyDelete-Carr makes it clear that "books will not remain exempt from the digital media revolution." He states that while most people have not shown much interest in e-books, the quality in digital readers is improving and given that they can connect to the internet and hold hundreds of books is what makes them appealing. I personally think e-books are unnecessary and just another way for the Man to take your money.
-Carr recalls Clay Shirky suggesting that deep reading is "overrated" and that "no one reads War and Peace". Shirky said that, "Our old literary habits were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access." Carr responds by saying Shirky's statement is "a little too staged to take seriously" and that "If you lack the time, the interest, or the facility to inhabit a literary work...then of course you'd consider Tolstoy's masterpiece to be "too long, and not so interesting".
Chapter 7:
-Carr aknowledge's the internets influence on peoples social lives by stating, "Because we're often using our computers in a social context, to converse with friends or colleagues, to create "profiles" of ourselves, to broadcast our thoughts through blog posts or Facebook updates, our social standing is, in one way or another, always in play, always at risk."
-Gary Small did an experiment in 2008 where he performed the first experiment that showed people's brains changing when they used the internet. Small split up a group of twenty-four volunteers into two groups of 12: the internet-savvy vs. the internet-challenged and scanned their brains while they used Google. The study showed that the web-savvy volunteers brain activity was much broader than the internet n00bz. The study also revealed that our brains are quite malleable and when we are using the internet they our minds are rewired.
-Carr explains our "cognitive load", the information flowing into our working memory at any time. When we over pack our cognitive load with information, we are unable to hold onto new information and connect it to prior knowledge. As we reach our limit of retaining information we are unable to differentiate important information from unimportant, forming us into mindless consumers.
Chapter 8:
-Google has been trying to digitize every book ever made and make their contents searchable through Google Book Search. Carr states that whether or not Google is the company that does it, the attempt reveals that eventually all books will become digitized in some form.
-Carr states that while "it was once understood that the most effective filter of human thought is time.", that we "no longer have the patience to await time's slow and scrupulous winnowing. Inundated at every moment by information of immediate interest, we have little choice but to resort to automated filters, which grant their privilege, instantaneously, to the new and popular." Essentially we want the newest and the best and we want it immediately.
QUESTION: How often do you use the internet? Do you feel guilty when you do?
Chapter 6
ReplyDeleteOn 104 Carr explains the difference in our thinking when we read on the computer rather than the printed page. He says, “When a printed book- whether a recently published scholarly history or a two-hundred-year-old Victorian novel- is transferred to an electronic device connected to the internet, it turns into something very like a Web site. Its words become wrapped in all the distractions of the networked computer.” I have tried to read books and scholarly journals online and have found that when they share a platform with the endless internet (even without hyperlinks and embedded photos or videos), I am inclined to grasp the points of personal interest from the work and distract myself exploring those points of interest searching the internet. When I read that way, I am not truly absorbing what the writer has to say or even trusting him but I’m instead entirely self-absorbed and likely spending more time on a search engine drawing my own conclusions about trivial details than giving the writer a chance to speak to me.
Carr also notes that as we change the way we read, people will change the way they write. The example of the cell phone novel is horrifying to me. I mean it is Japan but the thought that the best sellers were written through text messages on cell phones is undeniably a scary thought. They were said to have very little plot or character development…! Isn’t that what a novel is for? I understand that this is an extreme case but it still breeds concern for the future of literature.
One point Carr makes about the finality of books grabbed my attention. When something is going to print, the writer wants it to be perfect- there is a sense of permanence to the printed page. On the other hand, with digital text and online publishing, everything is temporary- work can be edited, updated, or refined at any point with very little hassle. With the mentality that everything published is a work in progress, it would be almost unexpected for someone to produce their best work the first time around when they can always fix it later. What is scarier is that the readers probably aren’t thinking with the same mentality and assume that what they read is entirely valid and thoroughly researched. Ahhhh!
Chapter 7
ReplyDeleteCarr emphasizes on 117 that the internet delivers positive reinforcement after positive reinforcement. When we search a keyword on Google, we are immediately rewarded for our inquiry with thousands of web pages to click through. When we post a status or a picture or a video on a social networking site, people commonly offer feedback or encourage the action with “likes.” I had never really thought of the internet feeding us constant positive reinforcement but once I read this and then got online I realized that oh my god it does! No wonder we’re all addicted.
Carr says on the shift from reading linear text or books to reading online, “what we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest” (138). When I read these words, I was terribly annoyed with the brilliance of this metaphor. That’s about all I have to say about that.
He concludes Chapter 7 with a quote from Samuel Johnson in 1775, “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” With the rise of the internet we seem to all know where to find information, but as a result of the internet’s shallow characteristics, we hardly know any subject deeply ourselves. I myself know that I don’t even try to remember a lot of things (even those that interest me) because I know I can find it later online. Retaining information is like old school or something.
CH 6
ReplyDelete-The rise of e-books is changing the way books are read. The deep focus of traditional print books are giving way to the distraction laden e-books.
-E-books are turning books into the internet with hyperlinks, highlighting text, and searchability. Book reading may eventually substitute the individual reflection and privacy for a fast paced social networked experience.
-While the internet is changing the way books are read, it will likely change the way books are written as well. Books will be written to make it to the top of search engine results. Books can contain videos in between lines of text.
CH 7
-The internet is changing our brains to be more attuned for multitasking rather than deep focus and reflection.
-Working memory plays an important role in converting short term memory into long term memory. Because working memory is overloaded on the internet with hypertext links, multimedia, and multiple open windows, it makes it harder for people to retain information.
-While we have a greater knowledge of where to find information, we don’t have a primary knowledge of deep grasping of a subject.
CH 8
-Googlism like taylorism is based on efficiency and a constantly growing number of something. It turns human beings into mere algorithms to be analyzed.
-Google’s income source is simple (ad revenue) but it is based on many complex complements. It is complemented by people quickly going from one page to the next and giving them as much data to analyze so that each person can be reduced to the most relevant ad for them. Google needs people to be distracted and move quickly from one bit of information to the next in order to be financially successful.
-The internet seems to encourage use of the newest information, and rips apart long form text that naturally goes together. Carr compares the noisy industrialism of the 19th Century’s disturbance of a peaceful small village to the internet's disturbance of contemplative thought.
Q. Is there any conceivable future technology which would encourage deep thinking? Does technology inevitably move towards things that are bigger and brighter and more distracting?
Chapter 6
ReplyDeleteCarr talks about the growing popularity of e-readers, specifically the Kindle, and how in the future they will make books obsolete. Charles McGrath, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and converted Kindle fan, believes that while books might not disappear, “in the future we will keep them (books) around as fond relics, reminders of what reading used to be like.”
This apparently unavoidable march towards e-readers will affect our reading experience. Rather than sitting and reading for hours on end, being lost in a book, e-readers encourage, through hyperlinks and note taking features, collaboration and sharing of the book experience. As Steve Johnson puts it, “We all may read books the way we increasingly magazines and newspapers: a little bit, a little bit there.”
The process of writing a book will also be affected by this shift to digital publishing. In the past a published book was a final copy, not to be revised, outside of some possible notes scribbled in margins by the reader. With digital publishing, a revision to a book is nothing more than an update to be downloaded.
Chapter 7
When we use the internet, our brains become overloaded with the stimuli a web browser throws at us, and, our “minds (become) consumed with a medium.” This stimuli the internet tempts us with also encourages us to click on every hyper link and become distracted from our main reason for using the web. Carr explains it best when he says, “the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.”
Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry, argues that, “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.” He ran an experiment to back up this assertion, in which he gathered 24 people, half experienced internet users and half not, and gave them brain scans while the searched on Google. The experienced users had a much more developed brain activity in the area needed for searching Google, though the non-experienced users massively developed theirs within a week only using the internet 1 hour each day.
Carr quotes Samuel Johnson to best describe the shift from books to the internet, “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it.” The internet has provided a great resource of where to find information about a subject but it makes it harder to “know” that subject ourselves. I think the danger of the internet comes from mistaking what we can find for what we know.
Chapter 8
Frederick Taylor created an “algorithm” for how each factory worker should work in hopes of creating the most efficient factors. This same theory is being used by Google to, “refine the algorithms that increasingly guide how all of us find information and extract meaning from it.”
With their ad revenue set-up based on how many people click on their ads, Google needs people to be scatter-brained while online. If companies are profiting from this distractedness, the debate of whether it’s good or bad for our brain will become secondary to company profits.
Google is trying to digitize all books, with its project Google Books. While it might be good to have a database of books online, Google is encouraging, “linking, sharing, and aggregating,” of the these books. This sharing again encourages the exchange of smaller amounts of information from a book, rather than the deep reading that a physical copy of the book calls for.
Q: Do you feel this shift to “distractedness” online is permanent or is it cyclical so in the future we might shift back towards deep thinking?
Chapter 6:
ReplyDeleteCarr goes into the vulnerability of the modern day book. The internet is increasing vastly, and so is the availability of books online. Classic novels are being copied to the web for people to purchase on their kindles and ipads. The sacredness of owning a book, and the fluidity of the words on each page are being replaced by simple, very accessible, compact, reasonably priced devices. Carr fears that with the progression of the web, books no longer have any use because everything will be available at the fingertips of everyone online.
Chapter 7:
With all of the social media websites like facebook, twitter, tumblr, we are trained to encourage people and show support by "liking" their posts, or following them. But those same sites, plus many many many more, are all also changing the wiring of our memories. Websites are too busy for our conscious minds to keep up with, so our unconscious is used. So much information is being thrown at us that we can't retain it all. And it never becomes a bother to any of us because "we can look it up later."
Chapter 8:
Google could be one of the most complex and advanced social media, but it is also the most convenient. It literally has everything on one website. You can search literally anything, have unlimited access to the the web, and now can connect with friends all over, including video chat with with more than one video at a time. But who is paying for all of this? Google relies on its adds; for it's consumers to click on each add, because they get a profit from each click. The more scatter brained we are, the more likely we are to click on the links. Good thing for google.
Question:
Do you think the effect on memory is as large as Carr says it is?
Chapter 6
ReplyDeleteCarr leads off this chapter by singing the praises of books. The major hurdle for online reading has been the quality, “the experience of reading tends to be better with a book” (pg. 104) Carr says. Even with the convenience technology brings us, books are not completely outmoded.
A critical point separating books and e-books is the shift in content that will occur as one over takes the over in popularity. Whereas authors once wrote knowing their reader would be alone with the writing and nothing else, now writers must realize that their audience is constantly distracted. The way writers’ writer will change because the medium for transmitting their work has changed.
By opting for the Net over traditional forms of media like books, magazines and newspapers, consumers are making a decision about how they will take in and process information too. Though this choice may be happening sub-consciously, it is very real and with every click we are choosing quantity over quality.
Chapter 7
Carr calls the Net users mind a “mind consumed with a medium” (pg. 121). With a book, the immersion is insular: the reader is in the writer’s singular story. The Net presents a variety of stories, along with video and audio. With the book, a reader is a consumer of the story, online the reader is a consumer of everything. The message is lost; all that remains is the medium.
Carr references a 2008 study, conducted by Gary Small and researchers at UCLA (pg. 123). These experiments aimed to prove that “people’s brains change in response to internet use”. They study users brains as they searched Google, both experienced users and people unaccustomed to the search engine. They discovered that the brain does indeed change in the face of a new medium.
The fear with a shift to Internet media dominance is that we will lose our ability to learn from the information we take in. Fragmented reading, like that done online, affects our ability to draw meaningful conclusions from the content. As Carr quotes Maryanne Wolf, we become “mere decoders of information” (pg. 125).
Chapter 8
Fredrick Winslow Taylor can be credited developing the methods of ever increasing efficiency that drives our technological growth today. By tracking the work of factory assemblers at a steel plant, Taylor was able to create a plan that boosted production and led to Taylor’s “system” being “embraced by manufacturers throughout the country” (pg. 149). This philosophy of faster and better remains to this day, as we see all technology being continually supplanted by a faster, better, smarter or cheaper model.
Google, and its marketing company AdWords, in keeping with Taylor’s philosophy, are at the forefront of the technological revolution. Their search engine redefined the Internet in its infancy, showing us how powerful information sharing can be. Along with that, they showed us how easy it is to profit off this desire for information through advertising, a common model that they have capitalized on in a major way.
Google and its ilk have created a new system of ethics that pertain specifically to online use. Realizing that its consumers hunger for ever more information, parsed out in tidbits and updated constantly, the ethics of the Internet is one of distraction.
Question: It sounds like we are all doomed to become automatons that spend all our time in front of a screen. How do we save humanity?
Seriously? I just did this, and my computer crashed.
ReplyDeleteI hate technology.
too many characters....
ReplyDeleteposted it on my blog
http://heythereyalllll.blogspot.com/
Chapter 8
ReplyDeleteCarr notes that online design is more of a science than an art. Every day Google is mathematically and scientifically modifying itself to better serve the searcher so that the searcher spends more time on Google. What makes this business strategy so compelling is the disconnection between product and profit. Like newspapers and magazines, Google makes its money with advertising, not with the sale of information. Once you factor in the complexities of advertising in this environment, it is obvious that the web is an intricately calculated system beyond the average consumer’s understanding.
On 158 Carr discusses the emphasis the web places on immediacy. We want to know what is going on in the world right now and information from ten minutes ago is out-of-date. When studying the Millennial generation last semester, we found that one of the strongest characteristics of young people these days is impatience. We have adapted to constant flow of information, quick results, continuous updates. As a result, we want everything right now, on and offline.
I love how Carr discusses the language we use in relating the brain and the computer. He says “I’ve referred to the brain’s circuits, wiring, inputs, and programming more than a few times in this book” (172). He later says that we use these terms to explain phenomena we don’t understand. The computer was not exactly modeled after the brain and the brain is only merely reflective of the computer, however we still have a lot to learn about how our brains function. The internet, we understand.
Q: If the internet is changing our brains and ways of thinking like you say it is, how do you think this will manifest in society as far as community and politics and the shaping of our culture?
ReplyDelete