Nicholas Carr has become rather famous--or infamous--for his book The Shallows. A quick way into his argument in from his equally well known article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" from which the book was developed. In some ways, Carr is updating the argument that Neil Postman consistently made over the course of his career in such books as Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. Postman came back again and again to the idea that new technology causes "ecological" changes instead of additive ones. He meant that, for instance, the printing press didn't just add books to an already existing pre-print culture. Printing changed everything in a cascading way that resulted in new behaviors and ideas regarding religion, education, wealth, new knowedge vs. old, and so on. In the same way, television didn't just supplant radio; television fundamentally altered everything in modern culture, from dating, to ideas of masculinity, to pop music.

Carr argues that the internet, with its hyperlinks, embedded ads, pixelated screens, and so forth, retrains the way the brain thinks about things. People now have a harder time reading lengthy texts for extended amounts of time. Even hard core readers--such as Carr himself--now find it problematic to read more than twenty minutes without fidgeting and wanting to check e-mail or follow a link to another page without finishing an article. People are finding it more and more difficult to read lengthy texts (like a Tolstoy or Conrad novel) and to argue in assertion-evidence-conclusion format.

This is depressing stuff, but it seems unavoidably true. However, there is hope, at least for people like those involved in the Institute. The human brain is amazingly malleable, and even in this emotive, therapeutic, hyperlinked environment, people can still train themselves in the old way--the way of Western habits of thought rooted in disciplines like rhetoric and theology and music. It is not impossible to train up children as little Greco-Renaissance-Christian types, and neither is it impossible for adults, though it's harder.

So get out your Erasmus, and Aeschylus, and Calvin, and Faulkner, and get busy reshaping your brain for the Lord and for your neighbor's sake.

Reformation dudes with books