Paper Cuts with Nicholas Carr

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

June 4, 2010, 7:00 am
Stray Questions for: Nicholas Carr
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Joanie Simon

Nicholas Carr’s new book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” is reviewed in this Sunday’s book review.

What will this Web Q. and A. do to readers’ brains?

Not much, unless I say something remarkably memorable. What changes our brains is, on the one hand, repetition and, on the other hand, neglect. That’s why I believe the Net is having such far-reaching intellectual consequences. When we’re online, we tend to perform the same physical and mental actions over and over again, at a high rate of speed and in a state of perpetual distractedness. The more we go through those motions, the more we train ourselves to be skimmers and scanners and surfers. But the Net provides no opportunity or encouragement for more placid, attentive thought. What we’re losing, through neglect, is our capacity for contemplation, introspection, reflection — all those ways of thinking that require attentiveness and deep concentration.

What are you working on now?

My last three books have been about computers and the Internet, and at this point I think I’ve said all I have to say on those subjects. With one exception: I’d like to write an essay on the hyperlink. It’s such a small, simple thing, but it’s had a vast and incredibly complicated effect on our intellectual lives, and on our culture, over the last few years. I’d love to unpick the link.

I’m spending most of my time, though, casting about for an idea for my next book, so far without much success. My dream is to disappear for ten years and then reappear, in sandals and a beard, with a strange and wondrous thousand-page manuscript written in longhand. Something tells me that’s not going to happen.

What role does the Internet play in your writing life?

It plays a very beneficial role in helping me to do research efficiently, to find, very quickly and with a minimum of effort, relevant books, articles, and facts. At the same time, it plays a very damaging role in constantly disrupting my train of thought and leading me down endless rabbit holes. Robert Frost had a lover’s quarrel with the world. I’m having a lover’s quarrel with the Net.

What have you been reading or recommending lately?

I’m currently making my third attempt to read David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” all the way through, and this time I plan to succeed. I quote, in “The Shallows,” some advice that Wallace gave to college students a couple of years before he died. “Learning how to think,” he said, “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” Those words strike me as being worthy of contemplation.