Things I've Said About Nicholas Carr

When figuring out how to analyze Nicholas Carr’s argument about how the Internet has changed our ways of thinking, I keep going back to my observations on my own ways of thinking when I attempted a twenty-four hour period with no access to media at all. I discovered that my brain is a remarkably impatient processor of the abundance of information that it has such easy access to. Carr says the accessibility of information stored in the internet not only shortens the hours spent in libraries to minutes spent on Google searches, but it also shortens the attention spans of the people using the internet frequently, who find that once they break away attention-deficit web browsing, they find themselves challenged to commit to a single reading. As much as I sympathize with that struggle, I find myself inclined to agree with Carr for the most part.

For another class, I read an article by Kathleen Jamieson about how speeches (from politicians and other orators) have dwindled down over the years from multiple hours to twenty minutes or so, and she blames the public in part for their shortening attention spans. Families used to walk for hours to hear a single politician give a three hour speech, and when books were the predominant form of private entertainment, reading for hours was common place. You get the idea that people didn’t have anything much better to do. And I guess it’s odd that less access to information would make someone keener to the details of an elongated speech or text, like the reverse effect of exercising a muscle. But then again the abbreviated snippets we choose to skim through on the Internet would be like doing half a pushup, then half a jumping jack and so on.

Carr goes back to Plato’s criticisms of the written word threatening to replace genuine thought, and Guttenberg’s printing press threatening close to the same thing. And they’re valid observations; the advancing development of the media has been resulting in our shortening attention spans. And in turn there seems to be a feedback loop where our shortening attention spans prompt the media to offer us shorter and easy-to-consume snippets of information, such as Carr’s example of The New York Times devoting some of its pages to “article abstracts” so readers can get a nutshell understanding of the articles’ main points.

But Carr also acknowledges the benefits of the Internet and having vast access to all this information. Just as the written word was invaluable in passing down information to develop cultures, and the printing press in proving information to the common man for the first time, the Internet is a splendid resource, and since he’s not quite attacking the Internet so overtly, it’s hard to find his argument, well, arguable. The way I see it is that our minds belong to us; we can feed them whatever we want, and it’s our responsibility to exercise them and take care of them. If we don’t, we can become lazy and impatient with the way we consume information and turn into the things Carr has essentially worried about.