Thoughts on Who Knows What

I realize the irony that I rented an audiobook version of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr from the Fairfax Library, but I couldn’t bare the thought of spending money on a book I knew I was going to hate. And, let me just say, hate it I do. I have never read a more torturous book. His every word grinds my gears and drives me CRAZY! Not only is this book tedious and repetitive, which it most certainly is, it’s written with such bias and grandeur that it serves to become pointless. I, as a reader in the modern age, realize what the internet is and what it can do; there was no need to spend such a generous chink of chapter 5 explaining it to me. It feels as if he’s talking down on the modern person when in fact it is him who is stuck in the past and unable to appreciate that times change. It’s not that in all my fury I’m unable to admit he may be correct, it is in fact that he is incorrect and I have ample proof that comes from simply living and observing in the modern technological age. There is no statistical way to prove that the internet is causing us to lose our attention. Correlation DOES NOT EQUAL causation! He may be able to pass off simple stats as fact, but he cannot pass them off as proof of his ridiculous claim. If you take a second to look at the average student he would realize there no group that is capable of focusing more. Daily, students spend hours on end slogging through textbooks and articles, taking notes and posing questions. Another thing he fails to realize that the while the numbers may show a trend, the trend is not representative of individuals. I for one love reading books, actual physical printed books! AND when there is a story I’m particularly drawn to, I WILL spend hours reading. I’m currently invested in one of those books! (It’s The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller I absolutely recommend people check it out it’s incredible. Ok tangent over, I thought the book deserved a plug) This doesn’t just apply to me either, there are so many people I could point out in my life; friends, acquaintances, family and even enemies for lack of a better term that thoroughly enjoy reading. Ask most reading enthusiasts how they like to enjoy their books and I would bet that a significant portion would agree that physical printed copies are the best. This even stands true in the case of textbooks. I hypothesize that if you were to poll random students from colleges all over the country and even the world that the majority would chose printed textbooks. No matter how Carr tries to spin his so called evidence, the printed medium is not at risk and the internet is not at fault for loss of attention spans.