I've been interested in The Shallows (Nicholas Carr) for a while now, but I haven't gotten around to reading it. It's apparently generated something of a buzz. They're coming out with a lot of research which is showing how multitasking and cyberspace alter the ways in which we think, and I'm not sure that I like the direction in which it's being altered, if the research is valid. Which, as I said, I haven't had time to look into as deeply as I would like.
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Extremely interesting article! Has anyone read the book Feed by M.T. Anderson? Your article reminded me of it.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(novel)
No, but I love M.T. Anderson! I should definitely look this up.
ReplyDeleteI tried to cut and paste a great line from that article, but it wouldn't let me. Hmph. Anyway, "the irony is that had the computer come first, we would be wringing our hands at the fact that our children were wasting time away from the multitudes of information available online by getting wrapped up in a single topic paper tome." I find this rather interesting because it holds books out at a "rhetorical distance" and calls out a form of information we so revere, ie reading a book, as just another absurd way to spend our time.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting (and very self-assured) article. What fascinates me in this article is the familiar recourse to 'environmental' rhetoric: the forest, the magpies, the environment itself...all this, yet mixed in with more literal biological language. My hunch is that the new media technologies pose a figurative problem that obstructs how we can think 'scientifically' about this technological matrix (and our interactions with or our being inextricable from it). This use of rhetoric is analogous with "the information landscape" in Darnton's book; and it also sounds like it might be lurking in Carr's "The Shallows," too: deep water, shallow pools, currents, undercurrents, the mainstream, eddies...one could even consider the sandy beaches of Foucault at the end of "The Order of Things," and the unfamiliar stream at the bottom of the valley in Barthes "From Work to Text." I think I might write an essay about how new media critics resort to environmental rhetoric...what critical traction they think they are getting from this discourse.
ReplyDeleteEnvironmental imagery kind of has an unsettling effect when placed next to the "man-madeness" of something like the iPad, I think. This is entirely based on my personal experience, but I feel like I could incorporate something which is man-made like a book more easily into a landscape of trees and streams than I could something like the iPad, which miraculously lights up and makes noises and you can't actually see how it works. I mean, you might understand how it works-- though I certainly don't-- but you're still kind of taking it on faith that all of those parts are in the iPad behaving in the way that they are supposed to behave, while for all you know the thing could just be possessed by a paper-thin gremlin. So when we liken the iPad, which is extremely man-made to the point where I don't even know HOW it's made, to something like a stream or a tree, I personally find it jarring.
ReplyDeleteWhich is sort of odd, because I don't understand all the components of a tree either. Much less a stream. But I at least know how a book is made and what to do if it breaks, which is comforting.