Thinking and attention
My former colleague Henri Yandell analyses the differences between context switching and multitasking, and between deep and shallow thinking here . Rory Cellan-Jones has a less interesting but more...well, more BBC, take on the same subject here . I guess they're both prompted by The Shallows by Nicholas Carr - a man with whose previous writings I have disagreed violently. Looks like the subtitle on the paperback has quietly been changed from "What the Internet is doing to our brains" to "How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember". Presumably the old title was provoking too much hostility. Carr's thesis about shallow thinking is very different to, say, Tyler Cowen's Age of the Infovore , which argues that the Internet now allows us a much deeper and more engaged experience with the narratives of our lives. Rory's argument (and that of Douglas Adams, to whom Henri links ) is that this debate has been going on for m...