Nicholas Carr

Reading isn't just a monkish pursuit: Matthew Battles on "The Shallows" » Nieman Journalism Lab More on Carr's ideas from "The Shallows" BoraZ interviews Eric Roston and gets some good ideas about journalism and reporting, past, present and future. The Cure for Creative Blocks? Leave Your Desk. Or why my move to London is a good work idea. Razib says what can't be said too often: Your genes are just the odds Also worth many reminders: Healthcare: U.S. spends more, but gets less, from the Well Not again with the sekrit Renaissance brain anatomy! But yes: again.  I want to see this…
Last week's spat between Nicholas Carr and Steven Pinker generated a lot of attention â and, happily, delivered a couple of the more lucid framings yet of the debate over whether digital culture makes us shallow, as Carr argues in his new book, or simply represents yet another sometimes-distracting element that we can learn to deal with, as Pinker countered in a Times Op-Ed last Thursday.   I sympathize with both arguments; I see Carr's point but feel he overplays it. I find digital culture immensely distracting. I regularly dive down rabbit holes in my computer, iPhone, and iPad,…
I don't have the attention span to write this article. In the course of penning this introductory paragraph, I've taken umpteen email breaks, gotten distracted by several Wikipedia wormholes, and taken an hour's time out to watch Frontline documentary clips on YouTube. It has taken me, in toto, seven days to write a five-paragraph article about my generation's decreasing attention span. At least the irony isn't lost on me. A social researcher tracking my movements across the web might discover that, in the words of University College of London professor and director of CIBER (the Centre…