Beginning of Class Writing: Carr, The Shallows, Six

For today’s class, you read the sixth chapter from Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Spend the first ten minutes writing your summary of the reading. Focus on what you identified as this chapter’s thesis or argument. Type up your response and post it as a comment here before we meet next Monday.

15 thoughts on “Beginning of Class Writing: Carr, The Shallows, Six

  1. nowshadhossain

    I have just read the sixth chapter from “The Shallows ” by Nicholas Carr. Here is the chapter summary : Out of all the medias, ” Book” has been most resistant to the internet’s influence. A book dramatically changes whenever it becomes a part of internet . According to Nicholas Carr, ” As soon as you inject a book with links and connect it to the Web — as soon as you “extend” and “enhance” it and make it “dynamic” — you change what it is and you change, as well the experience of reading it. An e-book is no more a book than an online newspaper is a newspaper.”. It basically means that internet changes a book by bending it in its own way, and traditional way of reading is possible no more. The merit of the printed book gets shattered into million pieces, and with that Amazon or ibook gives you more reading recommendation . Nicholas Carr’s thesis in this chapter is The internet is changing the way we read book. But this change may not be a good thing.

  2. SandraG.

    ‘ The Very Image of a Book’ starts off with a book being “most resistant to the Net’s influence” This means that the internet was probably created because books inspire thoughts. Printed books are slowly losing business, but the idea of books are still the same. Carr starts discussing the pros of reading printed books . He then states “despite years of hype about electronic books, most people haven’t shown much interest in them.” People nowadays aren’t interest in reading online as much due to other features the device may have. This can relate to another idea Carr talks about which is how a novel is transferred to an electronic device. This turns the novel into a website rather a book which could be distracting.

  3. Cisco Alers

    Some people say that the book is the most resistant in the change that is happening with our internet. I can agree with that statement. Sometimes it is very difficult for me to choose a book or an eBook as my reading device. Most of the time I pick a book because I like to save my battery, as well as take notes on a book. Some people feel that it is more convenient to have an eBook version. I have a feeling that soon there will be less people reading books.

  4. Vaswanie Cover

    “Of all popular media, it’s probably the one that was been most resistant to the Net’s influence.” This quote sums up most of the chapter because; the chapter’s main focus was to talk about the transition from the book to the computer screen age. Books are now used less and less as the computer age advances but, it still has its uses. As a result of books being transferred to computer screens in formats of for example, PDF or even eBooks, book sales have been affected negatively. Businesses that focus on the sales of books make less profit than it was before this huge transition. Today, most of the population uses touch screen devices or smart phones that has internet. The way we use everyday items in different ways are called affordances. Just because you don’t physically flip through the pages of a book doesn’t mean you can’t slide through each page on a computer screen. Douglass Engelbart (1968) was known through the quote, “Mother of all Demos”. His job was to advertise. Carr goes on to say that this advancement to physical copies to digital may do more harm to us than good.

  5. rahat ahmed

    Rahat Ahmed
    Professor Ellis
    English
    11/29/15

    The Shallows

    In this chapter of “The Shallows” Nicholas Carr talks about how Books have survived numerous technological advances because none of these innovations could replace reading. Now, this favored pastime is being swiftly out shone by the internet and e-books, and many people see this shift as a positive one. Nicholas Carr also discusses a recent Japanese trend I personally had not heard off called cell phone novels. Authors compose on their mobile devices and upload string of text messages online. The stories became wildly popular and according to Carr’s research the 3 best-sellers in Japan in 2007. I personally believe that reading is one of the best ways to keep your emotions in check because whenever I read something I try my best to gain the most out of the reading and see if any of it relates to my life. Books have gone through a lot of changes but there are certain things in life that just doesn’t change and after reading this chapter I can assure you that Books are here to stay forever.

  6. Bilal.Shadizai

    In chapter 6 Nicolas Carr talks about the change in books and the way it’s changing. Carr stated that “changes in reading style will also changes in writing style”. The way people writes now is based on their reading, we learn from reading how to write. Before the writing was called Scriptura Continua, and there were no spaces or punctuations, and gradually the writing has changed. Modern writing has punctuation and spaces which helps a reader understand the writer’s idea. People learn different from reading books than reading on monitor screen, the feelings are different and the features.

  7. MarcG

    Before I give my summary of the reading , I just wanted to say I found this chapter a little funny and Ironic because I am reading it using a kindle app. In this chapter Carr mostly talked about how book went to numerous changed over the year.He also gave pros and cons about having the ebook version . I personally think the pros outweighed the cons because like he said in the previous chapter technology is bidirectional which mean if I can only carry my phone and have a choice between reading or listening to music.

  8. Emmanuel.C

    Today we are here to talk about chapter 6 of Nicholas Carr’s famed title, “The Shallows”. In chapter six, Nicholas Carr’s main starting point begins with him discussing how much books have changed over the past few years. Back in the early years, the way people wrote was basically off the top of the head and form memory, today we focus on reading materials and thinking and summarizing the materials and writing it all down on paper or typing it up. In the past there was no such thing as punctuation marks and capital letters, the ancient people just focused on getting the message written out, much like how some people write online today. When people are texting or messaging on something like Skype, 70% of the time they’re either too lazy to capital the first word in their sentences or let auto correct do the work for them, that is the difference between back then and today. We all learn differently, some learn better through physical reading through a book or novel, others learn better from observing and listening with their own body parts.

  9. Angelica Vargas

    According to chapter six in the book “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr, he focuses on How books have evolved using the help of technology. Books can be read on variety of devices now. Books are rarely used by us due to the technology advancing. E-books are the versions of reading in the 21st century.Nicholas dose think the technology will do more harm to us in the future.

  10. Shamani Patton

    Popular media is the most resistant to the Neta influence. E-books have been taking over many book publishers have suffered many losses of business. Many people like to feel the book and it’s many pages, and the weight of it to actually enjoy the book as a whole. Books has advantages that E-books doesn’t which is a digital book on a tablet screen. Books can go anywhere with you, without breaking, shutting off, dying or anything. You can sit on it, go to the beach and not worry about water damaging it and also you can easily pick it up and start reading from where you stopped at. Digital readers have also improved greatly in recent years. Vizplex isn’t a charged particle film developed by the Massachussetts company E Ink, the clarity of digital text now almost rivals that of printed text. The Web is beginning to influence book writing came in 2009, O’Reilly Media, is an American publisher of technology books, he bought out a book about Twitter that had been created with Microsoft’s PowerPoint Presentstion software. He used a web-like model of standalone pages which he calls “modular architecture” reflecting the way people’s reading practices have changed as they’ve adapted to online text.

  11. younisa97

    In chapter 6 of “The Shallows”, Nicholas Carr explains how hard copy books are slowly losing business to internet sources, ebooks, and what not. Why purchase a book and pay money when one can just go online and read everything you would need to know about the book. Of course it takes away the classic concept of “reading”, and is in a way lazy. I personally prefer reading through a device because i dont like holding books and constantly flipping through pages. It is also more convenient to carry most of our books on our devices, instead of me carrying 5 books, i can have those 5 books in my ebook.

  12. Jonathan Valverde

    In Nicholas Carr ‘The Shallows’ chapter six titled ‘The very image of a book” Carr discuss how books have slowly transformed into the digital world. Now a days you can read a book online or using a device such as a kindle. He goes on to say how e-books can become a diversion because they come with features. Overall I wasn’t interested in the chapter, but i can agree with some statements that technology can harm us but I also believe it can benefit us even more.

  13. PrinceM

    In the sixth chapter of Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows”, he talks about the effects of the Net on books. As a whole, he feels, books have been the most resistant to the influence of the web. The new innovation, eBooks, do not “enhance” the book reading experience, rather, they eliminate it. Everything that makes it a book, the haptics of page flipping, the feel of closing and opening it, even the way its read is gone and the only thing left is the words. At that point, it becomes much like a website, more digitally-fed information to the brain. In my opinion, books and the internet have grown together, though this may be the efforts of the authors themselves in the interest of keeping their books relevant.

  14. Sasha

    In Nicholas Carr ‘The Shallows’ chapter six titled ‘The very image of a book” Carr discuss how books have transformed into the digital world. As computers have become a huge reliable source for reading the experience of reading tends to be better. As soon as you inject a book with links and connect it to the web, as soon as you “extend” and “enhance” it makes it “dynamic” you change what it is and the experience of reading it. Therefore, people find it more interesting when there are links added to a book. For example, many books come with online summaries or videos to them, where people rather read a summary and watch a video than actually reading the book itself.

  15. Claribel

    In chapter six of Nicholas Carrs The Shallows, he speaks on how the experience of reading tends to be better with an actual book. Books have survived manyy technological advances because these changes and advances cannot replace reading, but with e-boooks and the internet it looks like things may change. Books are being transformed into other forms of technology such as Kindles. When it comes to e-books and even regular books, people have become used to the concept of links and extras coming with the book/e-books’ content. Almost how John Medina did with Brain Rules. John Medina provided a link with references, a video, and summaries of each chapter. To some people this makes a huge difference and makes the reading more involving and more interesting. These, what may seem as simple changes to some people, change the overrall experience of reading. Carr also discussed cellphone novels, a Japanese trend, becoming a worldwide tren, where an author publishes stores on their mobile devices and then uploads a string of texts online. Due to this cellphone novel production, there were three best sellers in Japan in 2007. According to Japanese reporters, readers are not using actual books because “their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally too wordy, and their stories are not familiar to them.” These were the reasosns for them creating their own platform.

Leave a Reply