Amazing that this was written in 2014! I am sorry I missed it then. I guess I didn't really want to know, thought the benefits would outweigh the harms. One of the biggest mistakes of my life, which fills me with not negligeable amounts of shame (I was stupid) and regret (squandered life). But this won't happen again and I am eagerly awaiting your new book. Any idea when it will be available for purchase in the UK?
I actually just checked (again) and it is now available for pre-order on Amazon UK with an estimated delivery date on the 5th February. Looking forward!
This is one of the pieces which after you read, it really feels out of place to comment, because you are afraid of being insincere, which I very much may be.
Nonetheless, thank you Carr! I have learnt from your work a deal. And I still am. Thank you so much!
Somewhere McLuhan says that electronic man’s seeming “detachment” is just a symptom of an intense and crippling inner involvement with his experience. It’s true that we use the smartphone to find relief from this involvement — for example in a public place — but this isn’t detribalizing us. The smartphone is a living organism which draws us into the living moment of tribal experience. And Tribal man lived in a “world of his own” as well—a world of collective representations through which he experienced and felt his own involvement, just as the smartphone user does now (often painfully outside the screen, pleasurably within it). Tribal man was just more well adjusted than we are to this psychic state, so his tribalism seems more genuine and authentic to us now
What’s fascinating about this concept of being shaped by the nature of the medium in which we engage, is that some promote fundamentally positive and adaptable human behaviors. The technology of language is fundamentally structured to shape us socially. There is no real language in isolation. Thus, to engage more with the technology of language is to be fundamentally shaped into a more social being. Similarly, the structure of reading is fundamentally shaping our brains to engage our imagination, and ability to appreciate conceptual and symbolic abstractions. In the case of the smartphone it appears structured against adaptable behavior. It is a small box of hallucinations, absorbing us into an environment which doesn’t truly exist. As beings which operate from cognitive mechanisms aimed at observing and making sense of the material world, a brick that absorbs us into a nonsensical immaterial environment appears entirely antithetical to our flourishing.
Amazing that this was written in 2014! I am sorry I missed it then. I guess I didn't really want to know, thought the benefits would outweigh the harms. One of the biggest mistakes of my life, which fills me with not negligeable amounts of shame (I was stupid) and regret (squandered life). But this won't happen again and I am eagerly awaiting your new book. Any idea when it will be available for purchase in the UK?
I don't think a UK publisher is lined up yet, but I assume you'll be able to get Norton's US edition somehow.
I actually just checked (again) and it is now available for pre-order on Amazon UK with an estimated delivery date on the 5th February. Looking forward!
This is one of the pieces which after you read, it really feels out of place to comment, because you are afraid of being insincere, which I very much may be.
Nonetheless, thank you Carr! I have learnt from your work a deal. And I still am. Thank you so much!
Something about this interpretation seems off.
Somewhere McLuhan says that electronic man’s seeming “detachment” is just a symptom of an intense and crippling inner involvement with his experience. It’s true that we use the smartphone to find relief from this involvement — for example in a public place — but this isn’t detribalizing us. The smartphone is a living organism which draws us into the living moment of tribal experience. And Tribal man lived in a “world of his own” as well—a world of collective representations through which he experienced and felt his own involvement, just as the smartphone user does now (often painfully outside the screen, pleasurably within it). Tribal man was just more well adjusted than we are to this psychic state, so his tribalism seems more genuine and authentic to us now
Smartphone usage has felt like going into a (anti)social atomization centrifuge.
What’s fascinating about this concept of being shaped by the nature of the medium in which we engage, is that some promote fundamentally positive and adaptable human behaviors. The technology of language is fundamentally structured to shape us socially. There is no real language in isolation. Thus, to engage more with the technology of language is to be fundamentally shaped into a more social being. Similarly, the structure of reading is fundamentally shaping our brains to engage our imagination, and ability to appreciate conceptual and symbolic abstractions. In the case of the smartphone it appears structured against adaptable behavior. It is a small box of hallucinations, absorbing us into an environment which doesn’t truly exist. As beings which operate from cognitive mechanisms aimed at observing and making sense of the material world, a brick that absorbs us into a nonsensical immaterial environment appears entirely antithetical to our flourishing.