Bittersweet

Is the Internet making us Smart/Stupid?

So Nick Carr and Clay Shirky have been having this fun debate lately, a debate that, ironically enough, was my original reason for entering a PhD program in 1993. It was my main research question. (I've since updated the ideas with a conference presentation, if you want to see the slides (with notes), here: Are Human Beings Becoming Dumb Terminals? )

Anyway, it is a fun topic that runs all the way back to Plato, so it consumed a good five years of my life, more like 10, if you consider it remains a true obsession.

Thought you might like to debate what it means for literature and reading here! I'll excerpt a few thoughts from both guys.

Techcrunch: No, The Internet Won't Make You Stupid.

Nick Carr is worried the Internet is making us stupid. [...] He thinks the Internet is rewiring our brains, perhaps for the worse, and he’s written a book to warn us all about it called The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Carr also finds links to be too distracting.

[...]

Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker wrote in the New York Times on Friday that “cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk,” and NYT Bits blogger Nick Bilton marshaled some other counter-evidence as well. Carr then responded to Pinker’s Op-Ed at length, claiming that Pinker has an “axe to grind here” because Carr’s point that experiences can change the brain on a cellular level “poses a challenge to Pinker’s faith in evolutionary psychology.” Of, course, Carr has his own axe to grind. Remember, he’s the one pushing the new book.

[...]

At the core of Carr’s alarmism is that the Web is simply at odds with deep, contemplative thought and reflection. It’s really a defense of book learning in its most basic form—again, not surprising coming from an author of books who values above all else the printed word.

Meanwhile, Clay Shirky (a guy with whom I've had some acquaintance) believes the Internet is expanding our minds, exponentially.

    

Does Poetry Matter? - A fun discussion we can take up here too

Link: Does Poetry Matter? - Paper Cuts Blog - NYTimes.com.

Fun discussion on the Paper Cuts blog at the NYTimes. I thought a few excerpts from here might provoke some thought and interesting discussion from our perspective on here.

Chris

Does Poetry Matter?

By GREGORY COWLES

Sometimes the planets align and you start seeing the same idea discussed by different people everywhere you look, as if your brain had stumbled late at night across a niche cable station broadcast by the universe itself. For me lately the show has been all about the relevance of poetry, as in: Is poetry relevant? Even among poets there seems to be a nervous consensus that it’s not.

Writing in the latest issue of Poetry magazine, for example, David Biespiel argues that “American poetry and America’s poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, democratic, political and public life.” He suggests, a little hopefully and a little bitingly, that this decline in significance stems from a lack of political involvement. “The poet who engages democratic dialogue and political life is the renegade,” he writes, “while the one who lives on the margins, settles into tenured existence or remains committed to engaging only other like-minded types has aligned himself with something that in its best, purest and most satisfying form is bourgeois comfort.”

What we've been talking about...

There's a fun site called Wordle that lets you put in Feed URLs (or paste documents, or Delicious usernames) and it will generate an image based on word-use frequency. Since our tag cloud isn't working the way I want it to (give me time, give me time!), I thought I'd generate an image from THIS site feed, from a moment in time, today, to make a found poem of sorts out of all the stuff we've been posting! 

Feel free to go to Wordle and play with it. It's a lot of fun. Click on the image below to enlarge for easier reading.

Trouble Commenting

Web Mistresses, I seem to have lost the ablity to comment. Let's see if I can still post. I change my screen name by capitalizing the 'B.' It happened after that. Even though signed in without trouble, the preview and post buttons are greyed out.

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I dunno, Franz, but this post itself seems to have trouble accepting comments. I've tried to post a comment on it twice myself, and it said they took, but they didn't take. I'm wondering if the lack of title had anything to do with it, or the delay in the databases updating your name change (it has to propagate through various servers and Typepad databases, and you may have posted this from limbo-land before it was all fixed).

One thing you can do that might fix the issue is to trick out your Typepad Profile more completely. Add a photo, put in a little witty bio blurb, something like that. Save it again. Heck, save it a few more times. Then give it about 3-4 hours, and try commenting, and see if your little profile image shows up next to your comments.

TO EVERYONE:

If anyone is having trouble with Typepad, don't hesitate to open a Help Ticket when you are logged in (upper right, Help link, also here: http://www.typepad.com/account/help). Even if you can't describe exactly what happened when the issue arose, the developers need the feedback. They are usually quite diligent in answering and fixing things.

Chris

For those with an interest in literature for young people

Link: Education Week: The Case for Literature.

A friend, Tracy Gardner, tweets as @newsfromtengrrl  or http://twitter.com/newsfromtengrrl. She works at NCTE, or did last time I checked, and tends to post link pointers to things many of us care about.

Today she had a pointer to this article, and it had some neat bits that related to a side conversation in the comments on one of the poems in here (for those of us who took Heather's Kiddie Lit class in Arkansas, or have a strong interest), so I thought I'd share.

Published in Print: February 10, 2010, as The Case for Literature

Commentary

The Case for Literature

By Nancie Atwell

A few weeks ago, I received an urgent e-mail: The National Council of Teachers of English is looking for volunteers for an ad hoc task force whose charge is to gather evidence about why literature should continue to be taught in the 21st century.

Apparently, the worth of book reading had become an issue among the work groups that, behind closed doors, were writing the K-12 “common-core standards” that promise to shape curriculum in U.S. classrooms. Given that the Common Core State Standards Initiative is dominated by test-makers and politicians—representatives from the College Board, ACT, Achieve, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Governors Association—I was dismayed, but not surprised, that the NCTE was finding it necessary to lobby on behalf of literature.

An Invitation

Come on and put up your poems with mine, anything except sad clowns.