Light Scrape

Monday, March 21, 2011

Deep vs. shallow

As a continuation on the "internet makes you stupid" posting from yesterday, there was a kind of opposing view in an article at NYT, Andy Selsberg writing about Teaching to the Text Message:

A lot can be said with a little — the mundane and the extraordinary. Philosophers like Confucius (“Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is perilous.”) and Nietzsche were kings of the aphorism.

And short isn’t necessarily a shortcut. When you have only a sentence or two, there’s nowhere to hide. I’m not suggesting that colleges eliminate long writing projects from English courses, but maybe we should save them for the second semester. Rewarding concision first will encourage students to be economical and innovative with language. Who knows, we might even start to leave behind text messages and comment threads that our civilization can be proud of.

So, who is right, Nicholas Carr who says that internet makes human beings shallow, or Andy Selsberg who likes the concise format of writing in electronic communications?

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Spring skiing - and on the rewiring of the brain

Tracks

Road

Clouds

Houses

Bow

I have been reading Nicholas Carr's provocative book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Carr discusses how the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember - making our brains (and ourselves) different from what we used to be before.

Carr shows plenty of examples how technology changes people, some of which is anecdotal but plenty of which is backed by fresh psychology and neurology research, using techniques such as brain imaging. When reading a book, our brain acts very differently than when using browsing the net. Instead of deep contemplation we are skipping here and there, never focusing.

Although in principle this shouldn't be a big deal - we have adapted to technology before, for example in pocket calculators. But the net is different. It doesn't engage deep thought, and little of what we read goes from the short-term memory to the long term memory. And because we are what we remember, we are changing as human beings.

I highly recommend this book. And how this is related to photography?

I realized that maybe also the camera you use may rewire your brain differently. (This thought was inspired by Andreas' recent posting.)

The difference may not be that big - or it might be. Our brains are such adaptable, plastic things, changing all the time, getting rid of stuff we no longer use (like the skill of reading books) and developing new skills instead.

We can change ourselves by changing our approach to photography. The camera we use may affect how we see the world, in quite dramatic ways. So it may not be such a trivial thing which type of camera you select.