FT on Shallows

June 01, 2010

Christopher Caldwell reviews The Shallows in the Financial Times:

The subtitle of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition of those published in the 1950s about how rock ’n’ roll was corrupting the nation’s youth; or in the 1970s about how television was turning kids into idiots; or in the 1990s about the sociopathology of rap music. But this is no such book. It is a patient and rewarding popularisation of some of the research being done at the frontiers of brain science. Carr has lately found it harder to concentrate on the serious reading he used to love. He is taken aback by the number of smart people who no longer read books. He puts the blame on the mental habits we have all learnt on the internet ...

Continue.

Posted by nick at June 1, 2010 12:01 AM

Comments

I clicked through to the full article but almost immediately saved it to my growing Instapaper backlog ... because I got distracted.

Posted by: Ahopeful at June 1, 2010 06:04 AM

I'll point out there's something of a False Dilemma logical fallacy. He seems to be arguing it's either a unsophisticated polemic, or a serious argument. But he doesn't seem to consider the possibility of sophisticated polemic.

Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at June 1, 2010 03:20 PM