Writing, American Literature, and Media Ecologies文献资料.pdfVIP

Access Provided by Nanjing University at 12/15/11 3:14AM GMT Writing, American Literature, and “Media Ecologies” Randall Knoper * The Writing Revolution: From the summer through the fall of 2010, there was a flurry Cuneiform to the of publicity about Nicholas Carr and his just-published book, The Internet, Amalia Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. There were E. Gnanadesikan. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. articles by him and excerpts from his book in a variety of newspa- pers and magazines—with such titles as “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains”—as well as scores of reviews of the book and dis- Enduring Words: Literary Narrative in a cussions of his ideas. An elaboration of the controversial article he Changing Media published in The Atlantic in 2008, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Ecology, Michael Wutz. the book clearly struck a chord with its argument that the internet University of Alabama is rewiring our brains, and not for the better. As Marshall Press, 2009. McLuhan asserted in the 1960s, Carr writes, “media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contem- plation” (Shallows 6). If the printing press “made long and complex works of prose commonplace” (“Is Google”), and shaped our ability to interpret texts and “to make the rich mental connec-