A fascinating essay by Evgeny Morozov in Prospect, and I have taken the liberty of pinching their very attractive illustration. Morozov, provoked by Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (to be published in Britain in September), begins by having some fun at the expense of The Spectator, happily the 1889 edition not the contemporary one. In it, they warned ominously against the perils of that new-fangled invention - electricity!
They were happy to acknowledge the material benefits but deplored the certain harm to intellectual standards:
Foreshadowing Marshall McLuhan by almost a century, the magazine deplored a world that was “for purposes of ‘intelligence’ reduced to a village” in which “a catastrophe caused by a jerry-builder of New York wakes in two hours the sensation of pity throughout the civilised world.” And while “certainly it increases nimbleness of mind… it does this at a price. All men are compelled to think of all things, at the same time, on imperfect information, and with too little interval for reflection.”
That, magnified a thousand-fold, is a good description of the internet in all its growing ramifications. Nicholas Carr, in his book, warns that receipt of an almost non-stop inflow of information will reduce intellectual stringency, not least, he supposes, because it will reduce the capactity to concentrate. Morozov counters this gloomy assessment by pointing up the enormous benefits, not the least being the ability of 'the Net' in all its amorphous forms, to correct its own worse faults.
A fascinating article that I recommend you to read.
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