Quotes from The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Up to now, concerns about the inﬂuence of digital media on language have centered on the abbreviations and emoticons that kids use in instant messaging and texting. But such affectations will probably prove benign, just the latest twist in the long history of slang. Adults would be wiser to pay attention to how their own facility with writing is changing. Is their vocabulary shrinking or becoming more hackneyed? Is their syntax becoming less ﬂexible and more formulaic? Those are the types of questions that matter in judging the Net’s long-run effects on the range and expressiveness of language.

book 09.12.2011 16:42 by Triin

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The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

It seems likely that removing the sense of closure from book writing will, in time, alter writers’ attitudes toward their work. The pressure to achieve perfection will diminish, along with the artistic rigor that the pressure imposed. To see how small changes in writers’ assumptions and attitudes can eventually have large effects on what they write, one need only glance at the history of correspondence. A personal letter written in, say, the nineteenth century bears little resemblance to a personal e-mail or text message written today. Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.

book 25.11.2011 17:03 by Triin

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The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.

book 25.11.2011 16:44 by Triin

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The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Whether a person is immersed in a bodice ripper or a Psalter, the synaptic effects are largely the same.

book 25.11.2011 13:21 by Triin

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