The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Carr, Nicholas

ISBN 10: 0393339750 / ISBN 13: 9780393339758

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.59. Seller Inventory # G0393339750I4N00

Synopsis:

Atlantic MonthlyThe Shallows

Review: 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

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

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

A must-read for any desk jockey concerned about the Web's deleterious effects on the mind.

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.

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

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.

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,

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to ...
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: 2011
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket