From Thoughtful Man to Blogger

Posted on June 14, 2007
Filed Under Ideas |

Nicholas Carr has a small discussion going on at Britannica Blog, from his post yesterday called From Contemplative Man to Flickering Man, whose central theme is the change in the nature of our intelligence brought about by the change in the media of our knowledge consumption. But it’s an uneven presentation.

He starts with a really useful primary observation - that intelligence takes its shape from the externals it perceives rather than from an inherent solidness of its own - but then he makes connections that are uncalled for.

He says, “The linearity of reason is blurring into the nonlinearity of impression,” which is a tenable point, but in the same sentence he concludes with this woeful non-sequitur: “after five centuries of wakefulness, we’re lapsing into a dream state.”

This is a spaghetti dish of inarticulate premises - where to begin to untie this clump of undemonstrated claims?

Nicholas Carr’s article could have taken in concepts such as the cultivation of unstructured information to be captured for codification in structured systems; it could have saluted that aspect of intelligence that recognizes patterns; it might have seen enormously increased recognition-training happening in the face of the global network’s prodigious flicker of bits.

Finally, the article could have looked at the reality we perceive, and questioned if in its primordial arising reality comes to us first in sentences or sense impressions - the point being, which might be our more accurate apprehension of reality?

But sadly I don’t have the energy to do more with this discussion today. It’ll come up again.

-Ross Hunter

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