GET LIT (ALL WEEK LONG): Win a copy of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

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GET LIT (ALL WEEK LONG): Win a copy of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

POSTED: Tuesday, June 22, 2010, 8:00 PM

Welcome to Book Quarterly Trivia Week! From now till June 23, we'll be inundating you with opportunities to win free copies of books from our Summer BQ. For the first time in BQTW's history, we've got copies of every single book we've reviewed, previewed and shouted out (even in Icepack!). So keep an eye out at 9 a.m., noon and 3 p.m. every day for plenty of chances to win.

W.W. Norton, 276 pp., $26.95, June 7

After six days' worth of BQTW blog formatting, I can personally attest to Nicholas Carr's argument that the Internet is rotting our brains — or at least our attention spans. In his brand-new The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Carr suggests that "the Net is remaking us in its own image." Yikes. Here's what CP's Andrew Thompson had to say about it:

Carr's argument is a temperate one, and he gracefully praises the Internet's immense usefulness while avoiding brash criticisms. But his argument is powerful: The history of Western thought henceforth, he argues, has been toward contemplation and deep-thinking, which he also refers to as "linear" thought — that is, a Westerner opened a book, consumed its entire argument and context and, through the process of silent reading, meditated on its contents. The Internet, however, presents the strongest rupture to this historical arc we have yet seen — an arc Carr brilliantly chronicles from oral tradition to printing press to the present, providing a wonderfully concise primer on how the West came to consume information as it does — because of the web's omnipresence and its ability to supplement so many of the linear vehicles of thought we once frequently used, like television, radio and books. Oh, and newspapers.

To win a copy of The Shallows, answer the following trivia question:

Who called the Internet "a series of tubes"?

E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win, and be sure to put "The Shallows" in the subject line. Check back tomorrow for the final day of Book Quarterly Trivia Week! It's gonna be a doozy. [UPDATE, Wed., June 23, 9:50 a.m.]: Congrats to CM reader Sam, who correctly identified the tube-talker as Sen. Ted Stevens.

Posted by Carolyn Huckabay @ 8:00 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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