A recently published essay by University of Virginia professor Chad Wellmon in The Hedgehog Review stands as one of the most elegant, incisive, and persuasive entries I’ve yet read in the great debate over the effects of the Internet/digital media revolution on human consciousness and culture. And I’ve read a fair amount of them. Wellmon…
Category: Internet & Media
Your personal filter bubble, or What Facebook and Google are hiding from you
You would have had to be hiding under the proverbial rock in order to avoid hearing about the concept of the “filter bubble” in the past year. It comes from peace activist and MoveOn.org cofounder Eli Pariser’s 2011 book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. The basic idea is that the…
The Google Effect: New evidence of the Internet’s impact on brain and memory recalls Plato’s ancient warning
It’s not every day you get to note/observe/say something like this: A 2400-year-old warning from Plato has just been confirmed, or at least inadvertently recalled, by newly published research about the cognitive and neurological effects of our now-ubiquitous culture of Internet searching. Here’s the lowdown: Researchers at Columbia University. . . say Google and its…
Google CEO Worries that Google Is Making Us Stupid
Okay, so the headline I gave to this post is a bit slanted for rhetorical effect. When Eric Schmidt, Google’s 54-year-old chief execusive and chairman, spoke last Friday, January 29 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he didn’t actually repeat and respond to the question contained in the sensationalistic headline of Nicholas Carr’s…
Zombies, Digital Media, and Cultural Preservation in the New Dark Age
“How secure is our civilization’s accumulated knowledge?” That’s the question posed in a recent essay by Richard Heinberg, one of the most consistently brilliant, reasonable, and nuanced writers about the ecological and cultural-civilizational ramifications of peak fossil fuels and economic calamity. In “Our evanescent culture and the awesome duty of librarians,” he offers a detailed…
Hemingway, media culture, and the impoverishment of modern English
It’s been awhile since a conversation at the Shocklines message boards elicited a response from me that I wanted to preserve here at The Teeming Brain, but just yesterday it happened again and resulted in my writing an article-length piece that briefly traced my personal, lifelong evolution and growth as a reader. The inimitable Des…
The Internet is melting our brains
The current issue of the Atlantic Monthly (July/August) has an interesting cover story by Nicholas Carr — “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” — about the effects of the Internet revolution on human cognition. I bought the issue at the airport last weekend while waiting for my flight…