In this book—which had its beginnings as an article in the Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"—Nicholas Carr asks how the Internet is affecting the way we think. Our use of the Internet and digital media certainly warrants serious attention. According to a statistic cited by Carr, most Americans spend at least eight and a half hours per day looking at a computer, television, or mobile phone screen (87). We need to consider what all of this screen time is doing to us because, as Marshall McLuhan observed decades ago, "The medium is the message." The Internet is not simply an empty form that only takes on meaning depending upon the content that it is used to convey. Embedded in the form itself are assumptions about who we are and what life is all about. In Carr's words, "As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it—and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society" (3). For this reason, we should not only be concerned about the kind of content we access through the Internet, but also about the ways in which this medium is changing the way we think and live.
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Issue: "Word and Sacrament: Making Disciples of All Nations" July/August 2011 Vol. 20 No. 4 Page number(s): 61-62
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