Computing The Cost

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The Sun Interview

Computing The Cost

Nicholas Carr On How The Internet Is Rewiring Our Brains

by Arnie Cooper

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ARNIE COOPER is a freelancer based in Santa Barbara, California, who has written for Dwell Esquire , and the Wall Street Journal . Lately he’s been spending much of his time trying to convince his Akita pup, Kenta, to stop eating rocks and wood chips.

Anyone who has spent a few hours on the Internet understands how reading a single paragraph can lead to a multimedia journey so far-reaching you forget what you originally went online to look up. Nicholas Carr — author of last July’s Atlantic cover story, “ Is Google Making Us Stupid? ” — believes the distracted nature of Web surfing is reducing our capacity for deep contemplation and reflection. He began developing his theory when he realized that, after years of online information gathering, he had trouble reading a book or a magazine. As he puts it, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. . . . I’m not thinking the way I used to think.”

Growing up in a small town in central Connecticut in the seventies, Carr couldn’t have imagined he’d someday make a career of critiquing computer technology. He read a great deal as a boy and entered Dartmouth College with hopes of becoming a writer. He graduated in 1981 with a degree in English literature and spent a year working as an editor and playing in a punk-rock band before he entered a graduate program in English literature at Harvard University. The theoretical focus of his courses failed to ...

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http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/399/computing_the_cost

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/399/computing_the_cost