Thursday, June 10, 2010

The Uses Of Half-True Alarms | The New Republic

An excerpt from a thoughtful review of The Shallows.  

Unfortunately Carr does not entertain the possibility of unexpected gifts from the internet. He does not ask whether associational thinking—thinking that leaps horizontally, connecting dots that previously were segregated or “siloed”— might actually benefit from the non-stop multitasking in which one’s center of consciousness is constantly intruded upon by fragments of periphery. Could it be that the great electronic torrent of bits, bytes, and buzz does not only turn all minds into short-term data dumps, but also might promote the creative discerning of patterns where none were evident before? This strikes me as an unanswerable question but not a worthless one, even though it can only be properly asked if one reverts to weasel-word qualifiers.

The Uses Of Half-True Alarms | The New Republic

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