Alex Wright Interviews Author Nick Carr
July 14, 2010
Alex Wright interviews Nick Carr, author of the much-discussed Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (July/August 2008), alongside a review of Carr’s new book The Shallows. In the brief Q&A, Carr touches on how designers may benefit from a better understanding of neuroplasticity, on the future of print, and the merits of “unplugging.”
On the “oral” electronic text:
Communication in true oral cultures is always embodied in a whole person—it comes through direct, face-to-face contact—whereas conversation today is increasingly disembodied, mediated by machines and networks. One thing that shift suggests is that we’re moving away from thinking of ourselves as members of local, physical neighborhoods and toward a sense of ourselves as participating in abstract communities, groups of disembodied avatars. – Nick Carr
On whether books are destined to “go digital”:
So while we tend to focus today on whether the Web will kill the newspaper or the e-book will kill the book, I think the most profound changes are taking place at a deeper level. Our reliance on computers and the Net is training us to take in information in a certain way—fast, distracted, in small bits—and that training will, in time, alter our general reading and thinking habits. – Nick Carr
