Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2012

The Shallows

I just finished reading The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr.  The book stems from an article he wrote a couple of years ago called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

His argument: the web makes us worse at deep reading and thinking, makes it harder for us to read books, makes it harder for us to apply the sustained focus necessary to deal with complicated problems, complex arguments, etc.

Some evidence: eye-sensors that show that people skim web sites more than they read them; tests which show lower comprehension from website pages than the same text without hyperlinks and scrolling; anecdotal reports of people not reading books, barely reading long articles, just clicking from place to place.

I don't know what I think of his thesis.

There are definitely days I find it hard to focus.  There are definitely hours I waste clicking on things and reading them and I'm not sure any of it is productive.  I definitely wish I was more productive, no matter how productive I am on any given day.

I'm not sure I blame the Internet.  If it wasn't the Internet, it would be something else.  When I was a kid, I spent way too many hours playing baseball-related computer games.  (Computer games are not a good counter-argument to the evils of the Internet, but I'm not old enough to have had any pre-technology distractions.)  I watched TV.  I read books.  I believe that if not for the button that lets me check e-mail every three seconds, I would instead be distracting myself by playing with Silly Putty.

But maybe I'm wrong.

And even if I'm not, my own feelings about what he's saying and whether they apply to me personally don't negate his thesis.  But I still read books.  I might read more books than before the Internet.  I certainly read better books than I did before the Internet, because I have more ways to discover books I want to read, and certainly more ways to find them.  I read long articles online.  I skim lots of stuff, sure.  But I used to skim newspapers and magazines too.  I don't think I am shallower in my thinking because of the Internet.  I think blogging, for a long time, helped me access lots of deeper feelings and thoughts.  Certainly e-mail did.  I had much richer conversations via e-mail than in person, in a lot of cases.  Recently not as many, because people don't seem to write long e-mails anymore, but I've complained (or at least written) about that before and don't need to come back to it again.

In any case, interesting book.  Worth at least a skim.  I'm kidding.  Don't skim it.  That would just prove his point.

Next on my list (and I'm 20 pages in already): You Are Not A Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, which is a manifesto about how technology is making us less human.  He calls it a manifesto, and so far, it is.  In a neat and fascinating way.  Compelled so far.  Recommended, but it's too early to know for sure if that will change.

Work of Art

If you think I haven't blogged in three weeks, you're wrong, except that's all I'm going to tell you.  :)  If you find it, share it, but not in the comments please.  I hate that I feel like I'm doing some really nice blog-work over somewhere, and it's much, much harder to build an audience than I thought it would be.  I take it to mean that what I'm doing is simply not as compelling as my law school blog was, or Anonymous Lawyer was, but I want that not to be the truth.  Whether it was that much easier to build a readership a few years ago, or it's simply that the Anonymous Lawyer gimmick just happened to accidentally hit in a way that very little can, I don't know.  But I'm being humbled by the attempt.

On a separate note entirely, I'm strangely compelled by the new Bravo show "Work of Art" and I don't quite know why.  I don't enjoy art museums.  My wife and I went to the Whitney a couple of months ago and I found it very difficult to feel like I was getting anything out of the art.  We went to the Brooklyn Museum last month, and, again, I don't know, it didn't do much for me.  But I watched last week's premiere of Work of Art, expecting not to be interested, and yet I was totally taken in.  Most of it, I think, is just the general reality-show personal drama that works no matter the setting-- Top Chef, Work of Art, are they really so different?  But I think some of it is that the art works for me because I feel like I'm getting a glimpse into the artist.  I've written before about wanting to read books that give me insight into the author and how a lot of fiction doesn't work for me because I feel no connection with whoever the person behind the curtain is, writing it.  So maybe seeing the artists and then seeing the art makes the art more compelling for me.  But I also think I see artists-- perhaps especially modern artists-- as interesting people with interesting issues.  I'm drawn to slightly-tortured, melancholy people, in real life, for whatever reason.  There aren't a lot of them on TV.  Work of Art seems to have a bunch.  It works for me.  Absolutely recommended.

Not recommended, however, is Betty White's new sitcom that premiered on TV Land last night, called Hot In Cleveland.  I get that TV Land saw its original-sitcom niche as something that would feel at home among shows from the '80s and '90s.  But I wish they had decided to be more ambitious with that vision.