The shallows

McLuhan (2003) argued that we cannot fully understand a medium until we have moved on to a new dominant medium. McLuhan may have been partially correct, but it seems overly defeatist to relegate medium studies to the field of history, and despite its contemporaneity, many scholars have actively criticized our current dominant medium: the Internet. Although some academics have certainly taken a utopian stance to the Internet—most notably early theorists such as Negroponte (1996) and Lèvy (1997)—others have criticized the growth of the Internet from diverse disciplinary perspectives. The popular press, however, has seen much more of the Wired-inspired techno-utopian writing than any kind of cogent criticism on how life is being reshaped by a near complete reliance on the Internet. It is within this context that Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier set out to establish a necessary corrective to the techno-utopian strands that run through the popular literature on the Internet. The two authors come from different backgrounds—Carr is a New York Times best-selling journalist and Lanier is a founding father of virtual reality and an influential tech guru—and use different support for their arguments, but both books can be read together as a criticism of the blind and indiscriminate embrace of the Internet by the public at large. They remind the reader that technological adoption has consequences, and we all need to consider whether the consequences are worth it. For that, they should be commended. However, both books also suffer from major weaknesses that mar their intended effectiveness. We will start with a brief description of Carr's The Shallows and then move on to Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget

Carr · Context (archaeology) · Criticism · Discipline · Epistemology · Gadget · Manifesto · Media studies · Political science · Skepticism · Social science · Sociology · The Internet · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · History · Law · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy

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