Carolyn Crane: lab rat or what?

Uh! Mr. Crane and I were discussing this review of "The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains" by Nicholas Carr this morning, admitting how we get little addictive bumps of happiness from emails. The review appears in the New Republic here.

Here, a paragraph - gah! This is me, checking my email, blog, twitter and more, like, every 30 minutes...

And so we devolve inexorably into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.” These sweet tidbits are rotting our mental teeth. This is so, Carr maintains, because “the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions...”

This books is sort of about how these constant interruptions promote shallow thought, and endanger deep, more complex thought.

I can totally feel the truth of this - I do a little hard work and it's as if, oh, so difficult! now I want candy. And like an addict I put up fences (No social media for FOUR HOURS). Sometimes it works, but sometimes I just crash through the fence. Or sometimes I have to check my email for client purposes, and it turns into other stuff. And it's all these tiny little hits of goodness that add up to nothing. I know the topic is nothing new. Still, not a ROTFL matter!

Sometimes when I see that I have an unbroken stretch of time to write, I'll say, no being online for this amount of time, which, as I noted above, works sometimes and sometimes not, and I call it 'going dark' but what is that? Maybe I should inspect that terminology.

Part of me hopes it's not all that dire, in the sense that maybe the threat to ourselves as thinking, reflective beings might make us more aware of ourselves as thinking and reflective beings. Isn't that a good thing? I sort of want to make that the good thing for myself.

Sort of like, when at the end of an action adventure movie, the hero or heroine treasure and value a nice quiet dinner in a way they hadn't before. In this analogy, the Internet is Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 1 and contemplative thought is the quiet dinner.

Of course, I'm offroading from the book now, which suggests our neural pathways are getting re-routed. And, I guess there is no quiet dinner at the end of T1.

Noooo! Oh, look how serious I'm being this morning!!! It's not like I want to quit the Internet and twitter and stuff. Just bad effects of it. Thoughts?