
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Reviews

This book is in my top three reads of the year. It takes the reader on a journey through intellectual technology—from an oral history to early writing, through the inventions of scrolls, manuscripts, and books, to databases to the Internet today. On a parallel track, it investigates the structure and nature of our brains—how working memory, long-term memory, and neuro-elasticity function, and the roles that attention, deep focus, immersion, and distraction play. It’s not a pretty picture: most of the Net has optimized towards the selling and distributing of ads, which require our constant distraction and inattention—and it has a physical, neuronal outcome in our brains and working patterns. The good news? Elasticity implies it can be reversed. I was left asking new questions: what does it mean to use our technology mindfully? Why is it so important? What can we gain by doing so? And how can we be the driver of our own thinking processes?

a minha análise: http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...

Overall, it's okay and I find it making some compelling arguments for the shift in thinking that's been enforced by more technology but it spends more time centering on the medium rather than the way that it's been used. If the issue is truly overstimulation, we can find ways to reel back the stimulation while still maintaining the benefits of tech. Along with missing that significant distinction, it feels a bit out of date. That's solely the result of tech being a moving target that's easy to miss and the book being over a decade old at this point. Perhaps it's a testament to its presience but I'd probably say you should spend more time reading "Irresistible" by Adam Alter. If you find yourself still wanting more on the ethics and impact of tech, this is certainly worth the while but not something I'd recommend as a top-level view.

This is one of those books (like lean in) that is so often quoted and written about that you feel you don’t need to read it because you already know it. But when you do you realise it’s so much more than the headlines and sound bites attributed to it. I won’t rehash what it’s about merely say it’s worth reading and you can skim over the stuff you’ve read elsewhere or by someone else or the (now 4 years later) stuff that’s become dated or obsolete.

For a book that says the internet is making us shallow by changing the way we process things and is making us all easily distracted, way to go by filling the first part of the book with dry information about how the brain works, synapses and stuff! I almost felt like I couldn't continue reading the book at certain points, but continued cos I didn't want the author to prove his point. Ha ha. "The map and the clock shared a similar ethic. Both placed a new stress on measurement and abstraction, on perceiving and defining forms and processes beyond those apparent to our senses." The most interesting takeaway I got from this book was how our tools molds our minds and the way we think, on a far greater scale than we can imagine. Because we rely so much on the internet "as an extension of our memory" cos we can retrieve information so easily, we archive our information sources rather than store information.


















