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| The print book isn't going away. (Milvets Library) |
I like Nicholas Carr. His 2008 Atlantic cover story “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (expanded two years later into “The Shallows,” a 2010 Pulitzer finalist) helped catalyze a key idea: the distracting nature of digital culture, which encourages us to read widely but not necessarily deeply, flitting from concept to concept, piece to piece, like mosquitoes on a pond.
For Carr, this is both a social and a biological problem; among the most interesting parts of “The Shallows” are those dealing with the brain. Computers, Carr argues — or, more to the point, our use of them — are literally rewiring our brain chemistry, causing us to think differently than we did in an analog world.
Given all that, it’s perhaps not surprising that Carr should emerge last week with a Wall Street Journal piece arguing the e-book bubble may have burst. Read more...
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