The Internet, the “tool of the mind”
Translated by Sophie Balaguer. See the original article in French
Article also translated in:
The impatient « Homo interneticus » is a compulsive web user who doesn’t have anymore energy or capacity to read books over… 140 characters! This is the message of American writer Nicolas Carr’s book “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: the Shallows”. Louis Naugès, French blogger and businessman living in Spain, has read this book. And it is for us, hurried web surfers, that he summarizes Carr’s book. This is the second post on the subject. Will you be able to read it to the end?
Neurosciences recent discoveries show that our brain is constantly learning; we develop new ways of thinking, but we lose the old ones when not using them as much as we did.
The “tools of the mind” change the way we think and act.
Changes of our ways of thinking lead by these tools are quick and often irreversible.
Internet is the most powerful technology of brain change since the creation of the book.
Internet is at our service and is also becoming our master.
The web user loses his concentration, contemplation and reflection abilities.
Delegating our memory to the Internet is a huge mistake; human memory does not work like computer memory.
Reading a whole book is getting hard for many web surfers, even for people with an arts study background.
What Taylor did for manual work, might be done by Google for brain work.
The tools that modify our ways of thinking, our very brain.
Nicolas Carr calls them the “intellectual technologies”. Those are the tools that deeply changed the ways of thinking of humanity and… they aren’t many. Carr names four of them:
The alphabet, created by Greeks in 750 BC; with a set of characters reduced to 24 signs, it allowed the development of writing as a substitute to spoken word in the communication of knowledge
Socrates, the orator, vs Plato, the writer : an old debate!
Cartography, for our relation to space.
Mechanical clock, for our relation to time; invented by monks to regulate their cycles of prayer.
Writing materials : Sumerian heavy clay tablets vs Egyptian light papyrus (office PC vs. portable PC!), wax tablet (iPad!), first erasable material. The inventions of Gutenberg, in the XVth century, that allow massive and economic circulation of written knowledge.
The tools size diminution, from portable watch to “ octavo” format of books (notebook!); costs reduction, mobility influence uses.
1999: the Internet takes over as the new « tool of the mind »; it will have an impact on the way our brain works at least as important, and faster as the four historical technologies.
You can read the article in its full version by clicking here.
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