Archive for the ‘Nicholas Carr’ tag
Crying Wolf to Cash in on the Zeitgeist
Maybe we’re not quite addicted to computer mediated communication, but we’re certainly becoming increasingly dependent on it. Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, The Big Switch, and the forthcoming book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, argues that:
The problem with the addiction metaphor … is that it presents the normal as abnormal and hence makes it easy for us to distance ourselves from our own behavior and its consequences. By dismissing talk of “Internet addiction” as rhetorical overkill, which it is, we also avoid undertaking an honest examination of how deeply our media devices have been woven into our lives and how they are shaping those lives in far-reaching ways, for better and for worse. In the course of just a decade, we have become profoundly dependent on a new and increasingly pervasive technology.
Too often today, concerns about the implications of technology are dismissed because of the over-anxious language used by under-informed news media crying wolf to cash in on the zeitgeist. What are we doing to ensure that the voices of well-informed scholars and experts are not lost in the cacophony caused by the democratization of media? For example, how do we engage the public in civil discourse about issues like privacy, identity, and the changing face of media consumption before their attention becomes over-saturated by base sensationalism?
