SHIFTS IN TECHNOLOGY

Is the way we think affected by technology? Do the use of computers, and in particular, reading on the the internet, change the way we think? An article in the July/August 2008 Altantic Monthly article by Nicholas Carr called 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?' here thinks so.

I have pulled bits from this very long and interesting article:

[Thinking back in history] "In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, 'cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful'. And because they would be able to 'receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,' they would 'be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.' "

Then there is Gutenburg's printing press (1450s) which marked the beginning of the decline of the use of the pen and quill and the rise (and spread) of the printed word. However, there was the feeling (of scholars? writers?) that this move would certainly weaken the mind.

But back to technology transfer:

Nietsche's vision was failing. Sometime around 1882 he moved to a using a typewriter. "Once he mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

"You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.” "

So is the internet weakening our minds? Do people read books less? Are writers changing their writing style as they sit using word processors and search engines as their tools? Maybe writers are going from the old rhetorical style to the telegram style, to, nowadays, the sound-byte style?

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Letterpress Type and Slugs (top) Photo by Willi Heidelbach: Widimedia. The plate says "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and feels as if he were in the seventh heaven of typography together with Herman Zapf, the most famous artist of the".
Printing Press Photo: from Wikimedia: source is Meggs, Philip B. A History of Graphic Design. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1998. (p.64).
Typewriter Photo: (TheFaulkner Portable Typewriter), Wikimedia, Gary Bridgman, southsideartgallery.com