I’m reading a book by Nicholas Carr called ‘The Shallows’. I became aware of it after I was doing research for a project and found an extract in a magazine some years ago entitled “Is Google Making us Stupid?” The book examines the possibility that our brains and our cognitive abilities are becoming reprogrammed by the way we harvest information in the internet age. The author reminds us that the web is a conduit for much of the information that flows into our eyes and ears and is chipping away at our capacity for concentration and contemplation. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” he writes.

Carr references one of my favourite books called ‘Understanding Media’ in which the great theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out “Media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.” If you’ve read ‘Understanding Media’ or have any interest in the subject of new media, you might have heard of ‘The Medium is the Message’ and ‘The Global Village’? Both these terms were coined by McLuhan and what’s interesting is how his perception of ‘The Global Village’ has been distorted to pre-suppose some kind of positive outcome. In fact, what he meant was that media is responsible for declining social organisation – a sort of tribal village in which he forecast ‘An Implosion of Meaning’.

I’m only a little way through this book but it’s pretty good reading.