“… if the Internet is changing our heads, another question follows: What’s it doing to our hearts?” asks the Deseret News:
In his best-selling book “The Shallows,” Nicholas Carr asked what the Internet is doing to our brains. His conclusion, while controversial, is that digital life is reshaping not only attention spans, but the very neurons that control them, the mainframe of the brain. “For the past five centuries, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science and society,” Carr wrote. “It may soon be yesterday’s mind.”
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“Digital technology has forever changed several cultural values, some of them significant,” said Meredith Gould, author of “The Social Media Gospel: Sharing the Good News in New Ways.”
They include patience, swapped for expedience, and modesty, exchanged for self-promotion and branding. Other areas in danger of erosion are authenticity, which some people dismiss as unnecessary in Internet transactions, and the value of a private, dignified and restrained life, traded by many for the boisterous digital confessional that popular family blogger Glennon Doyle Melton has called “living out loud.”
What does this mean for building community, sharing of information, expectations of others, and ethics?
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Image by Bryan Helfrich via Wikimedia Commons
Posted by Ann Fontaine