Nicholas Carr has been writing about technology and the effect it has on us for more than a decade. In this book he traces the development of communication technologies right from the letters that people began writing to each other millennia ago, to the development of printing and newspapers, to the telegraph and telephone, to mass media like radio and TV, all the way to the internet and social media.
It is his contention that these technologies do not just add another means of communication or another avenue of entertainment to our lives, but that they actively rewire our brains, and change the way we think and function, often in irreversible ways.
As these technologies have snuck up on us, neither our laws nor our psyches have been able to keep up. Our world, the way we live and work and communicate has been changed beyond recognition, and most of us were passive participants in this change, going where the technology was taking us, without ever realising how profoundly our lives were being changed in the name of convenience and connection.
The central conceit of social media was the idea that it would be the engine that connected all of us. And maybe that was what it was trying to do in the beginning, but all these years later, the most notable effect of this instant communication and the ability to reach hundreds and thousands of people around the world, has been polarisation, the proliferation of fake news and conspiracy theories, and a world that feels more fragmented than ever.
This is a book that is rich with ideas and insights about the fundamental human desire to communicate and the ways in which it has been warped. Nicholas Carr takes a wide angle view of the history of communication and tells an engrossing story about the way each new technology changed the way we think and how thoroughly society has been transformed as a result.
This is one of those books that I could not put down.