Nicholas Carr: Rough Type Blog

[Scott Raymoure]

I follow Nicholas Carr's blog called "Rough Type." He is a writer interested in technology and how it is changing the way our brains work, and changing our society. He is pretty famous with people interested in this. His new book "The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing our Brains" is a bestselling book. He also went to Harvard. Reading his blog lets me know what is happening today, and he also talks about the history of technology; how it grew into the digital world we have from simple phones and TVs. 

In one blog entry I like, he talks about how our writing technology creates an "intellectual ethic" of the country. This is the people's attitude about what is important to learn and how we learn. For example, before computers, when we only read books to learn, learning was very quiet and something you did alone. People spent a lot of time reading one thing in detail. They didn't stop until they understood, then they moved on to another book to learn more. This made quiet and concentration on one task for a long time very important skills that people respected. But today, with all the digital technology, people read lots of different things at the same time. On the internet we can read 5 websites at the same time. Every time we read something interesting we hyperlink to a new place to read about it, or google it to find out more. This is a huge change from the book learning. It makes people respect doing many things at once and doing things quickly instead of quietly and with long concentration. Carr isn't against the new style, but he worries that we don't think deeply about things with the new style, and so we can't think as well anymore. We have to take care to still analyze and think about what we read!

Post a reply and let me know what your think!

[Scott Raymoure]

by the way, you can see the blog at  http://www.roughtype.com/

In an interesting post recently he talked about how electronic publishing is changing the meaning of the word "book." When we think of a book we think of permanent ink, something complete, something unchangeable, and being apart from the writer. But now, with electronic publishing an electronic book is never finished, it changes from day to day on a website, and it's almost temporary, and we can text or twitter or email the writer to talk with them. The nature of reality is changing because of this technology. Is it good or bad?