For today’s class, you read Carr’s The Shallows, Nine and a digression. What was his argument in chapter nine, and how does it fit into the overall argument of the book? How persuasive do you find his argument now that we are almost at the end of the book?
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In the beginning of Chapter Nine Nicholas Carr begins talking about Socrates who is a Socrates was a classical Greek philosopher credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy. Nicholas Carr explains that Socrates was right, since many people started reading what other people had written down they started to depend more on outside information rather than their own memory. Many things started to become stored on tablets instead of their minds, people began to rely more and more on what was on computer screens. It wasn’t about what information you needed to know, it was more about where to find information. Nicholas Carr restates what Socrates says, People began, as the great orator had predicted, to call things to mind not “from within themselves, but by means of external marks” meaning that people no longer memorized everything anymore. They looked it up. Socrates worried that writing would inhibit memory. He thought any new form of technology would ruin our brain, Although this was inaccurate, part of it was true. Someone who was against Socrates logic was Desiderius Erasmus, he stressed the connection between memory and reading. He invented a textbook called “De Copia”. He influenced “Commonplace books” which is compared to modern day school notebooks, though it was big in the Renaissance schooling. It was an important tool that educated people kept and carried around. This was a means to record data and gain knowledge by memorizing what was in these books. This was before the destruction of Recording Media known as “Artificial Memory”, leading people to rely on technology to store information instead of in their brain.
I have just read the ninth chapter from “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr. Here is the chapter summary:
Socrates’s prediction about “writing” was right. As people grew accustomed to writing down their thoughts and reading the thoughts others had written, they became less dependent on their own memory. Books provided people with a far greater and more diverse supply of facts, opinions, ideas, and stories than had been available before, and both the method and the culture of deep reading encouraged the commitment of printed information to memory.
Nicholas Carr also explains that human brains are not like computer storage. He said, “The memory stored in a computer, by contrast, takes the form of distinct and static bits; you can move the bits from one storage drive to another as many times as you like, and they will always remain precisely as they were”(191). That means computer stored memory is permanent, they doesn’t change. Human brain stores information differently. We don’t save something permanently. Our brain breaks it then recreates it and breaks it again until it finds a permanent place . It could take years just to store a simple memory. But when we start by using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.
On the chapter “ Search , memory” starts off with Socrates idea on writing down thoughts and becoming less reliable on our memory. Nicholas Carr compress this to having thoughts in our head which can be collected onto our electronic devices. Due to this, Carr feels unsurprised that computer databases can be a replacement for “personal memory.”
I think he also believes that this could also help memory by accommodating amassed abundant memory during clearance in our brains more valuable.
In Chapter 9 of The Shallows, Carr points out that the internet has made us lose all sense of our personal memory. Carr states, “The arrival of the limitless and easily searchable data banks of the Internet brought a further shift, not just in the way we view memorization but in the way we view memory itself. The Net quickly came to be seen as a replacement for, rather than just a supplement to, personal memory” (180). I wholeheartedly agree that the internet has not replaced our personal memory. Personal memory can be seen as episodes in your own life. One may infer that Carr may presume that the internet has turned into a replacement for our personal memory, but in reality it has not.
Today we start off with the 2nd to last chapter of Nicholas Carr’s famous book The Shallows. At the beginning of the chapter Carr mentions Socrates. Socrates is a well known western Greek philosopher. Carr states that Socrates was “right”. He then goes on to explain what he means when he states that Socrates was right. Socrates had made a prediction about writing in question. Socrates predicted that as time went on people would started to depend highly upon outside information and become less attentive and depend less on their brain’s ability to remember. Essentially, people started to rely on outside information instead of using their memory to recall such events on their own, a sense of laziness you could say. Over the years all sorts of information started to be stored on thing like stone tablets, papyrus, stones, paper, the internet, etc. Socrates believe that new technology would destroy our brains ability to remember, albeit that isn’t true what was true was that we have become less dependent on our brains memories because of things like the internet. Some people believe that the internet has become a substitute for our memories but in reality this isn’t remotely accurate. It’s true that we rely and depend on the internet more frequently, but their are things the internet can’t remember for us, our memories as we grew up. The internet may be a place of storage but it’s a storage with limited information, just like our brains. Our brains only store a certain amount of information, not all pieces of information we retain will be permanently kept in our brains “storage”.
In chapter nine of ‘The Shallows’ by Nicholas Carr, Carr starts out by referring to Socrates, he states, “As people grew accustomed to writing down their thoughts and reading the thoughts others had written down, they became less dependent on the contents of their own memory”.(177) In other words humans rely on what they have written down rather than self memory, this is related to todays world because humans rely on technology to much for stored information rather than remembering themselves. He goes on to say how the web effects our memory, he says, “not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas”.(193) In todays society we created in a sense of our own undoing with the technology more specifically storing important memory within the web and in doing so losing our valuable memory.
In Chapter 9 Nicholas Carr explained about how internet replacing out personal memory. Nicholas Carr stated that we are too obsessed with internet because we can search for things easily. Just like Socrates said human rely on what they have written not on their own memory. In today’s world people rely on technology and they don’t use their own personal memory like they rely on technology in their daily life. We use internet to store data that can be access easily and can be safe while they can use their own brain ability to memorize data instead of using technology. Today’s society rely on technology, without technology its hard for people to memorize things because technology made people’s brain lazy.
In chapter 9 “Search Memory” of the book The Shallow by Nicolas Carr, he emphasizes on how the internet is making us less responsible memory wise. Carr said, “they became less dependent on the contents of their own memory”. People nowadays believe in computers more than they believe in themselves. People tend to remember things as less as possible and depend on computers more. Everyone now believes that computer remember things for us, all we have to learn is how to find it in the computer. Carr states, “the sharper the attention, the sharper the memory”. People remember an event better when it is rich with emotions. Our ancestors could remember more things than we can because they had nothing to rely on, like we have computers. Depending on computers is not a bad habit, but in a long run we might even end up losing the ability of remembering something for longer.
As we all know by know, Carr always introduced a historical characters in his writing. This time it was no different, It was Socrates the Greek philosopher who believed that reading was evil because by reading outside information it enables us to be independent on others. Then he went out and explain how we relying on computers to remember things for us. He saying that computers is making us lazy, it might not be so bad now but later won’t be able to remember anything.
“Transcribing the excerpts in longhand, and rehearsing them regularly, would help ensure that they remained fixed in the mind.” This chapter stressed the use of the memory and how information made a transition from past to present. The way a person sucks in information got decreased as time passed. In the present, everybody had to learn everybody. In modern time, information is online and can easily be searched up. Nicholas Carr also talked about the famous Socrates (Philosopher) “an eternal fear: the fear that a new technological achievement could abolish or destroy…” Desiderius Eras (Dutch Humanist) disagreed with searching up information, he was all for the importance of using your memory to store information. Recording Media was also mentioned. Clive Thompson also quoted that, “I have almost given up the effort of memorizing information.” This proves that just searching up information is hurting us in more ways than one. Nicholas Carr also mentioned again how he had to shut down various accounts to regain concentration.
In this chapter of Nicholas Carr’s “ The Shallows “, he talks about the connection between a web search and one’s own memory. Nowadays, people would read so many online articles for countless hours and refer to those articles as reliable sources. Everything we view sticks to our memory faster than we can think but as a result, we believe we’ve learned something but instead of such, we just seem to become more and more lazy as time goes by.
In chapter nine of “The Shallows”, Carr talks about the outsourcing of human memory to google, and other such internet databases. Carr and believe that this is wrong, and robbing human brains of these cognitive functions will serve to weaken its capacity to carry out other functions. David Brooks and Don Topscott, on the other hand, believe that outsourcing this memory will free up grey matter for other uses, and this storing of otherwise useless information is better served to computers. Personally, I am on Carr’s side. I believe that if a person does not train their brain to store a lot of information, regardless to how useful that information may be, their brain will not have the flexibility to pick up new material at the same rate as it would if they had.
In Chapter nine Nicholas Carr explains how the internet is replacing our personal memory. The reliance on personal memory diminished further with the spread of the letterpress and the attendant expansion of publishing and literacy. Desiderius Erasmus,stressed in his book the connection between memory and reading. He urged students to annotate their books, using ” an appropriate little sign” to mark “occurrences of striking words, archaic or novel diction, brilliant flashes of styles, adages, examples, and pithy remarks worth memorizing. He recommended that every reader keep a notebook of memorable quotations was widely and enthusiastically followed. Middle of the twentieth-century memorization itself had begun to fall from favor. What had long been viewed as a stimulus for personal insight and creativity came to be seen as a barrier to imagination and then simply as a waste of mental energy. The Net quickly came to be seen as a replacement for, rather than just supplement to, personal memory. Two types of memory entail different biological processes. Storing long-term memories requires the synthesis of new proteins. Storing short-term memories does not.
In chapter nine of The Shallows, Carr explains the different brain functios. When he explains these brain functions he uses scientific experiments as references to back up his explanations of the brain functions. He reviews a suggestion from Dutch humanists Desiderius Erasmus about methods of documenting thoughts and information. He mentions “commonplace notebooks, which are notebooks that one kept “so that wherever he lights on anything worth noting down, he may write it down in the appropriate section.” These common place notebooks were soon discouraged and were not used. People now a days do not use memorization due to the rapid use of technology. If we forget something we simplpy go on and google and just have google tell us. We simply do not bother to memorize or remember anything anymore. We feel as though there is no need to. This is effecting our long term memory and also our short term memory as well.
Chapter 9 of the Shallows by Nicholas Carr, Carr talks about Socrates, which is a well know Greek philosopher. He talks about his prediction that as time passes mankind will use less of their brain and soon depend on an outside source to gain knowledge.