As we move from an industrial era mindset that new technologies have made obsolete, our ability to be plugged in and instantly connected has introduced us to unpredicted challenges and dangers. Recent books like The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, and Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants all look at the way technology affects the way we think or have actually recreated how we think.
Strong connections, it turns out, have only magnified the problems, turning local problems into national ones and national crises into international ones. Now, as all other forms of interconnections have improved, and as those interconnections have grown more robust thanks to the Internet, society is increasingly subject to interdependencies—not always for the better.
It is impossible to really understand what went on in the worldwide economic crisis of 2008 without examining the role that the Internet played in supercharging it. Without the Internet, the credit mess would have undoubtedly caused a recession of some magnitude. While we can never measure the Internet’s full effects, we know that it made the current crisis larger, more widespread, and more virulent. It not only carried the information, it helped spread what is known as a “thought contagion.” That is, the rate at which greed and fearmongering took place—via instant access to news and online rumors—was accelerated to unprecedented levels.
This is a book that takes a serious and scholarly look at world-wide technological change. He gives us the history of the Internet and then uses the economic crisis in Iceland as a case study. This is a book that will be talked about for years to come, written by a person who is not lamenting our loss of time but warning us of the larger new threats being overconnected brings into our lives.
I think most reviewers will find that Nicholas Carr's The Shallows and Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus hold very different, and possibly opposing, views of the Internet. But I found them to be perfect compliments to one other. Taken together, and read simultaneously, I think they provide a more nuanced and intriguing perspective of the potential effects of the Internet on our intelligence than when read alone (though they both undoubtedly stand tall in their regard).
Regular readers of this blog know that we're very interested (or at least I'm very interested) in how the internet is changing not only how we socialize, shop, and work, but how we think and function as human beings—individually, culturally, and as a society. Going back to 2007 when Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur went up against David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous, and continuing through last year when Nicholas Carr's The Shallows was released around the time of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus, we've been fortunate that publishers have put out books by great thinkers that take opposing sides of the issue that we can compare and contrast. It always sparks a lively conversation.