'Our cluttered minds'

Re: Yesterday's post. The opposing view to Clay Shirkey's in Saturday's Wall Street Journal was by technology guru Nicholas Carr. He's just written “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains."

A review in Sunday's New York Times Book Review takes issue with Carr's position that the Internet is destroying our power of concentration. (Vindication!)

One more historical/hysterical reference about how it has ever been thus:

Socrates started what may have been the first technology scare. In the “Phaedrus,” he lamented the invention of books, which “create forgetfulness” in the soul. Instead of remembering for themselves, Socrates warned, new readers were blindly trusting in “external written characters.” The library was ruining the mind.

Does the Internet make you smarter or dumber?

Saturday's Wall Street Journal posed just this question.

Clay Shirley, a deep thinker on the social and economic effects of Internet, says it's a tool for helping us be smarter -- if we wish. I agree. (I'm sure Shirky is thrilled.)

Yes, there is a lot of crap on the Internet. But, as Shirky points out:

Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid. This fear dates back to at least the invention of movable type.

After Gutenberg, the Church was alarmed that the Bible was being translated into language most people could understand. When paperback books became popular, authors bemoaned the lack of literary quality that was flooding the market.

It all comes down to freedom, Shirky concludes. And, I think, a few assumptions: that most people are good, that knowledge is power, and that learning is valuable.

It is tempting to want PatientsLikeMe without the dumb videos, just as we might want scientific journals without the erotic novels, but that's not how media works. Increased freedom to create means increased freedom to create throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in the experimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible. ... [T]he task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous and cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech.