Come and join what promises to be a lively debate in our second streaming event from The Festival of Ideas in Watershed, Bristol.
You will have the opportunity to network and share your thoughts with fellow attendees on the balcony of our event space The Annexe and feed questions into the Bristol event via Skype and Twitter.
Author Nicholas Carr’s take on the intellectual consequences of our internet use offers a sharp contrast to the optimism Clay Shirky shared with us this summer.
Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article, Is Google making us stupid? created worldwide debate. His new book, The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, takes his argument further. Human thought has been shaped through the centuries by ‘tools of the mind’ – from the alphabet to the printing press, and the computer. Carr argues that that the fragmentary and distracting experience of being online affects our ability to concentrate offline with far reaching consequences: from the way we live and communicate to the actual wiring of our brain.
Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic – a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence.
This is a Festival of Ideas event presented with Watershed.
For more information on Nicholas Carr’s views visit his blog and website.
To get involved in the debate before, during and after the event use the hashtag #foicarr
As well as enjoying the lively discussion one lucky person will win a signed copy of Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows – How the Internet is Changing the Way we Think, Read and Remember.
And here is Carr in action explaining The Shallows in a quick 1 minute roundup –