This week’s edition of the Forum features a very interesting strong clash of views about the information society between Nicolas Carr, bestselling writer of books critical of the new media, and Steven Pinker, a noted linguist and experimental psychologist. Carr has raised alarm that the Internet is wreaking havoc on the human mind, causing people to devolve inexorably into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment,” but Pinker argues that such panics over new media often fail basic reality checks, and that on the contrary, “far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.”
Read about Nicolas Carr’s indictment against the Internet in Advice and Dissent now!Read Steven Pinker’s rebuttal in Readings on Language now!
