The Internet and Our Brains

Nicholas Carr, one of our more astute commentators on the World Wide Web and its role in the present Information Age, has expanded on his oft-cited Atlantic essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" In his new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Being (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010). Carr provides some interesting commentary about how different reading traditional books is different from browsing or scanning the Web. Carr speculates how our writing is changing, how we may be comprehending less even when having more information to work with, and how our comparison of our brain to a computer may be fraught with many problems. Sprinkled throughout the book are interesting comments such as "the Web is a technology of forgetfulness" (p. 193). This book will stimulate a lot of discussion, and it is one that can spur on good conversation in our classrooms.