Original link: https://blog.yitianshijie.net/2022/08/08/who-is-afraid-of-nicholas-carr/
Ezra Klein writes about her changing attitude towards Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains . Like him, I’ve been avoiding this book, but not because I’m embracing the internet to despise this old man’s opinion. Even in 2010, when this book was published, I think it is inevitable that the Internet will make people shallow. I don’t need to listen to other people preaching anymore.
The changes in the past ten years should make many people who originally looked down on Carr transfer. Klein is one of them. But I got tired of the so-called “ability to ask questions” very early on. So for Klein’s article I’ll just take this quote from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt: “People are always discussing how to adjust, ah, why don’t you hide the number of likes. Tried on Instagram. But I’ll just say it straight: It’s absolutely unacceptable for teenage girls going through puberty to post pictures of themselves on social networks and wait for strangers or others to publicly rate them. No matter what adjustments, any architectural changes It can’t change that.”
As Neil Postman puts it, the problem isn’t that there’s too much trash on TV – it’s just for that, it’s the naive belief that TV can be used for non-intellectual discussions.
Many of my contemporaries and I used to think that the Internet was the road to freedom. I still think so. The internet has always trumped TV because it is so much bigger and it encourages you to write in all forms. No matter in the 1990s or today, those who use it to expand their minds are a minority of all human beings. This is good. And the internet is clearly better for junk than TV. This is better. The medium determines what you can do, but the Internet is not a medium, it is a controlled watershed . The Chi Chi Guild Hall, Shanna Pokédex, Facebook, and Douyin drifting in it are the medium.
(Carr’s 2015 simplified Chinese translation, “ Shallow ,” has a terrifying Chinese subtitle “Are you a slave or a master of the Internet.” Author of The Past 10 Years Of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid .)
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