Media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. When Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter, because his vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock. Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake: I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the instantly available. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become pancake people—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button. theatlantic/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 02:08:14 +0000
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