Tuesday, May 24, 2011

My blog will make you stupid

Apparently, my blog will make you stupid. It's no good fleeing to another blog, though: they all make you stupid. That is, if you agree with Nicholas Carr's book, "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains". The thesis of the book is that our use of the Internet is changing our brains, affecting deep learning, long term memory and our ability to focus.

I first heard about this book at a No Fluff Just Stuff developer's conference, where more than one panelist at one session cited this book with respect. Clearly, I thought, this is not a book for Luddites if a bunch of technophiles are reading it. This book is not a reaction against modernity. In fact, I'd say that it is trying to preserve an aspect of human progress now threatened by the Internet. I'll get to that in a moment.