Looks like there’s a dissenting voice to Nicholas Carr’s findings in The Shallows: I just saw this interview with Clive Thompson, whose new book is called Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.
It sounds like the two authors agree that technology is changing our brains – but based on this interview, Thompson believes we gain more than we lose. I’m interested in this concept of “ambient awareness,” especially in my work as a therapeutic educator. Does interpreting social media updates help us interpret face-to-face social behavior? Does the greater stream of information translate into a greater understanding of others’ thoughts and feelings?
I’m curious to see whether Carr and Thompson use any of the same data to reach different conclusions. Adding Smarter Than You Think to my to-read list.
Your reading list gets longer and longer, doesn’t it? That’s how you know you’re in graduate school. 🙂 So what do *you* think? Which one of them is correct- or is the real truth somewhere in between. As you’ve been learning from Wheately, “each of us is a different person in a different place.” Perhaps there’s a reality in which technology makes some of us smarter and others of us less so…