Another doubter of the internet-fries-your-brain theme
Subject: Another doubter of the internet-fries-your-brain theme
From: Clark Robinson <robinsonchicago@gmail.com>
Date: 6/30/10, 15:08
To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>

From another blogger on T/S--I had never noticed him until today, but this was in a post that was mostly about social networking:


"My inner skeptical inquirer raises an eyebrow at Deresiewicz’s unsupported assertion, familiar from Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, that technology is “taking away” our ability to concentrate. Hard facts regarding technology’s effects on the human brain are hard to come by, and too many of them look squishy under close scrutiny. Moreover, today’s calamity howling about the brain-eating horrors of hypertext sounds uncomfortably similar to the alarms raised in the late ’70s by the shoot-your-TV school of media criticism—Marie Winn’s fulminations, in The Plug-In Drug, about the boob tube’s effects on early brain development; Jerry Mander’s insistence, in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, that TV is pickling our prefrontal lobes."

From Mark Dery, Public Regions: The Fate of Solitude in the Age of Always Connect  http://trueslant.com/markdery/2010/06/25/534/


I don't think the comparison to the old TV-is-bad-for-your-brain is apt; TV, particularly for kids at the ages where you learn to read and maybe start doing it on your own, might have reduced the amount of reading activity that kids engaged in, but on the internet, there's a lot of reading involved, and you have to be able to write to some extent to participate--it's not passive like TV.