The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains [Hardcover]

Is Google making us stupid? When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebratedA thought provoking exploration of the Internets physical and cultural consequences, rendering highly technical material intelligible to the general reader.A must-read for any desk jockey concerned about the Webs deleterious effects on the mind.Starred Review. Carr provides a deep, enlightening examination of how the Internet influences the brain and its neural pathways. Carrs analysis incorporates a wealth of neuroscience and other research, as well as philosophy, science, history and cultural developments ... His fantastic investigation of the effect of the Internet on our neurological selves concludes with a very humanistic petition for balancing our human and computer interactions ... Highly recommended.This is a measured manifesto. Even as Carr bemoans his vanishing attention span, hes careful to note the usefulness of the Internet, which provides us with access to a near infinitude of information. We might be consigned to the intellectual shallows, but these shallows are as wide as a vast ocean.The best book I read last year  and by best I really just mean the book that made the strongest impression on me  wasThis is a lovely story well toldan ode to a quieter, less frenetic time when reading was more than skimming and thought was more than mere recitation.The subtitle of Nicholas CarrsNicholas Carr has written an important and timely book. See if you can stay off the web long enough to read it!Neither a tub-thumpingly alarmist jeremiad nor a breathlessly Panglossian ode to the digital self, Nicholas CarrsNicholas Carr carefully examines the most important topic in contemporary culturethe mental and social transformation created by our new electronic environment. Without ever losing sight of the larger questions at stake, he calmly demolishes the clich?s that have dominated discussions about the Internet. Witty, ambitious, and immensely readable,TlC4