Chapter 3
This chapter discusses the "intellectual maturation... traced through the way we draw pictures, or maps, of our surroundings." (pg 40) This is something to take note of for later use in this study. "[T]he development of our mapmaking skills closely parallel the general stages of childhood cognitive development." (Pg 40) This fact alone could present multiple ways to test the cognitive ability of a child drawing the same map from direction on paper and the directions from the internet, vs the directions read out loud.
Through the development of time as a unit of control over daily life the alteration of thinking patterns also occurred. According to Carr most of humanity was lived through an essentially continuous cycle of time not divided into any type of unit. It was "dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity." (Jacques Le Goff on pg 41) The clock is often linked to the fact that we now consider the world to fit into "measurable sequences".
The intellectual ethics are called up considering some of the biggest inventions for man and as Ralph Waldo Emerson put so eloquently "Things are in the saddle/ And ride mankind." The conflict between our tools doing what we do and us doing what our tools want us to is discussed., reminding me slightly of the lefty dilemma. There is a theory that modern man has more right handers in society because the tools that are used in everyday life are made for right handed people, thus the left handers are at a greater risk and die off or switch hands. It has been proposed, and I believe found to be true, that in ancient societies before tools were invented would have had an equal division of handed dominance. This is however hard to prove, and as of yet I have not found a supporting study, because... really how do you determine handedness with out the use of tools.
The question of all this changing in the brain and its impact on grey matter (the stuff that's important for sensory perception, memory, speech, and emotions) is brought into question. With new technology language is changed, and the metaphors people can use to accurately describe a natural phenomenon change. Interestingly an illiterate society was brought up and how literate people have "considerable detachment from feelings or emotional involvement that a non-literate man or society would experience." (pg 57)
This leaves me with the question how much of our society really wouldn't be possible if we were illiterate? I bet a large majority of it could be done without words.
Chapter 4
This chapter focused primarily on the development of writing and writing utensils. Along with this writing was also the development of different writing forms. Original Greek was written in scriptura continua, continuous writing. that required the writer and the reader to "translate" the work while they read. As writing materials became more accessible so did the method of reading it, no longer did you need to decipher to figure out what was being said.
All this emphasis on literacy makes me wonder what happens to those people in today's world that aren't literate. I seem to recall seeing a news special on teenagers in Detroit who where seniors in High School and couldn't read past a 5th grade level. They survived on memory and reasoning, but was it enough?
For an example of scriptura continua reading the following ThethirtythreethievesthoughtthattheythrilledthethronethroughoutThursday.
An interesting fact that Carr points out is:
The natural state of the human brain... is one of distractedness. Our predisposition is to shift our gaze, and hence our attention, from one object to another, to be aware of as much of what's going on around us as possible.
The fact that books required singular focus was a " 'strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development.' " Reading became alone time for every literate individual. Ideas began to be constructed and revised, varying from the norm and growing in numbers shifting the home of power between ideological institutions.
Carr talks about the invention of the Gutenberg printing press and how it truly revolutionized the world, past, present and future. This makes me wonder what people are going to say about the internet years from now. How will hindsight change the image of our present forms.
Carr then delves into the slightly conspiratorial rant. If papers can transmit ideas from one person to the next, prophesied Lee de Forest, some day information (such as political) would be simply placed right in the brain.
Chapter 5
Chapter 5 talks about the convenience of the net. It's simple to translate all information into a series of ones and zeros and takes up very little space to send those series form one place to another. Further more the internet has the advantage that no other information medium has had, it is "bidirectional". No surprise internet use has increased by over 30% in some areas in under 3 years. According to Carr all this usage is dissolving the boundaries between media sources. "Our attachment to any one text becomes more tenuous... Searches lead to the fragmentation of online works... we don't see the forest... (or) the trees. We see twigs and leaves. As companies like Google and Microsoft perfect search engines for video and audio content, more products are undergoing fragmentation that already characterizes written works." (Pg 91)
Like the air we breath, Carr describes the internet of the future as something one cannot help but interact with as it will be a part of everyday life. In the world of the future the printed word, claims Carr, will be pushed aside to make way for more image oriented, flashy forms of communication that will draw the persons attention to them.
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