"i fear the geeks bearing myths" (or: on mythological mistakes)
i was reading this article that i found off a digg.com post.
Our minds are under attack. At least that’s what I keep hearing these days. Thumbing away at our text messages, we are becoming illiterate. (Or is that illiter8?) Blogs make us coarse, YouTube makes us shallow. Last summer the cover of The Atlantic posed a question: “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Inside the magazine, author Nicholas Carr argued that the Internet is damaging our brains, robbing us of our memories and deep thoughts. “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world,” he wrote, “it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”
I have a hard time taking these Cassandras of the Computer Age seriously. For one thing, they are much more interested in our fears than in the facts.
er ..
in the story of the trojan war, cassandra was right;
it's just that nobody believed her.
actually, so was laocoön; it makes for a depressing story, but a rather well-inspired sculpture.
as for the article, it's not a bad read.
ADDED: then again, perhaps the allusion is not in error. maybe the writer is making a compromise, that yes, perhaps these worryworts have a point (but he will still not listen to them). it's not unlike how some students and parents complain about my teaching and begin their letters with:
"i'm sure that dr. _____ is a brilliant researcher, but .." (-:
Our minds are under attack. At least that’s what I keep hearing these days. Thumbing away at our text messages, we are becoming illiterate. (Or is that illiter8?) Blogs make us coarse, YouTube makes us shallow. Last summer the cover of The Atlantic posed a question: “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” Inside the magazine, author Nicholas Carr argued that the Internet is damaging our brains, robbing us of our memories and deep thoughts. “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world,” he wrote, “it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”
I have a hard time taking these Cassandras of the Computer Age seriously. For one thing, they are much more interested in our fears than in the facts.
er ..
in the story of the trojan war, cassandra was right;
it's just that nobody believed her.
actually, so was laocoön; it makes for a depressing story, but a rather well-inspired sculpture.
as for the article, it's not a bad read.
ADDED: then again, perhaps the allusion is not in error. maybe the writer is making a compromise, that yes, perhaps these worryworts have a point (but he will still not listen to them). it's not unlike how some students and parents complain about my teaching and begin their letters with:
"i'm sure that dr. _____ is a brilliant researcher, but .." (-: