Carr spends a great deal of time addressing the shift in reading from books to the screen and this phenomenon's intellectual implications. Because our online reading takes place in a land of distraction, we don't achieve the depth of processing that is achieved with a physical, linear book. As I form my own position about electronic reading, I've realized that I'm pretty much against it. I would never buy an online textbook, and the latest commercial I've seen for a Kindle makes it look suspiciously like any other Internet-capable tablet that would not facilitate the reading process. When I try to think about why I think this way, I realize that it's because I don't view things that aren't tangible, that I can't pick up and hold in my hand, as "real". Thinking about owning something that isn't physically present makes me pretty nervous, to be honest. I realize that if something happened to the hard drive on my laptop, I'd lose a whole whole bunch of work and be on the hunt for the paper copies of papers and reports I've written. While looking around on the Internet, I found something that seems to justify my fears about the transience of the Internet:
Basically, all of the information on the Internet is comprised of moving electrons that when all combined weigh about the same as a single grain of sand. Doesn't that make you at least a little nervous? The life's work of countless people stored by high energy particles that can't even be directly observed? Even with the sophisticated backup systems that are already in place and still being developed, our precious information is contained within a system that makes it accessible only if everything is working correctly. Carr includes quotes from proponents of making the Internet a kind of outboard memory that frees human attention for other tasks. Where would we be as individuals or as a culture if something we depended on as part of our brain suddenly didn't work?
1 comment:
Think of the entire Internet as a human brain. It's the same thing. The brain is only controlled by electrical impulses that trigger things on and off. Well the computer is the same way. Bits of information (1's and 0's) that are turned on and off via 'gates' that are controlled by electrical impulses. The internet is not a separate being from your own very computer. It is just a collection of computers in a larger whole. When you plug in a flash drive to transfer data, well it is the same transference if someone were downloading data from a server. Also, 'once something is on the internet, it is there forever' There is always ways to retrieve what is lost on the net.
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