Left Business Observer
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our
Brains , W.W. Norton, 276 pp. $26.95.
Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Culture in the Age of the
Drive, Polity Press, 140 pp., $19.95.
Hearts fluttered over the contribution of Facebook and Twitter to the Middle Eastern uprisings. No doubt they contributed, but so did things like pre-existing union agitation in Egypt. And it wouldn’t have happened had people not gotten out of their pajamas and into the streets. But, over the longer term, what is our
wired world doing to our minds and cultures?
These two books come at the same problem from different directions. Jodi Dean’s is explicitly from the left and rather theoretical, and Nicholas Carr’s isn’t explicitly political and is mostly empirical. But they both make you worry about the Internet’s effect on us. Neither author is a Luddite, and both blog. And they’re aware of the oddness of writing a book about the topic. The new media world is fast, faster even than TV, which rewards “fast thinkers,” as Pierre Bourdieu put it (see LBO #83). The speed of TV is driven by advertisers, who fear that anything seriously disruptive, like pausing to think, might interfere with sales effort. Though those preferences have become embedded in the assumptions of producers—they love bombast, phony conflict, quick cuts—one could still imagine serious conversation on TV, or disruptive art—in fact, we’ve all seen that now and then.
