So Many Links, So Little Time

Check out this interesting book review by John Horgan on Nicholas Carr’s latest book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

Try not to check your email before you get to the end of this sentence. See? That wasn’t so bad.

“While toiling over what you are now reading, I scanned my three email accounts dozens of times and wrote a handful of emails; I responded on my cellphone to a score of text messages from my girlfriend and kids; I checked the balance of my bank account to see if a promised payment had arrived . . . and so on.

Yet I’m relatively unwired. I don’t do Twitter, Facebook or Skype. And I did all this digital darting hither and thither even though I found the subject I was supposed to be writing about—Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows”—quite absorbing. And disturbing. We all joke about how the Internet is turning us, and especially our kids, into fast-twitch airheads incapable of profound cogitation. It’s no joke, Mr. Carr insists, and he has me persuaded.”

Read the rest on WSJ.