released 2/14/2025

Critic Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (W. W. Norton, 2011), talks about how technology-driven trends affect our cultural and personal lives. He reflects on how various technologies have made it both easier and more common for people to multi-task and split their attention. He suggests that singular intellectual focus is a kind of unnatural development in the life of human beings that is nonetheless desirable as a maturation or added sophistication of human capacities for creative and deep cultural work. Many technologies tend to undermine this capacity for focus; others, like social networking, tend to shape human relationships in terms of discrete transactions that aggregate in various compartments and categories. Life in society, however, does not consist and is not served well by this modular, computational and transactional form of relationship, but is in many significant ways fuzzier, more spontaneous, more open-ended, unified, and unstructured. Carr continues with a discussion of the implications for education and art, a look at reading and technology, and the importance of long-term memory. He concludes with autobiographical observations of his own experience and some lessons learned.

This conversation was originally recorded in 2010; a shorter version of it was featured on Volume 105 of the Journal. The original essay in The Atlantic that sparked Carr’s book can be found here.

56 minutes

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