Web apocalyptic and integrated: is the Internet making us stupid or smart?

Abstract

Both the American books reviewed in this paper - Nicholas Carr's The shallows. What the Internet is doing to our brains, and David Weinberger's Too big to know. Rethinking knowledge now that the facts aren't the facts, experts are everywhere, and the smartest person in the room is the room – deal with the issue of how the internet is changing the way we learn and communicate. Still, they come at diametrically opposite conclusions. Carr claims that the excessive use of the Internet may limit our concentration and understanding abilities, making it more and more difficult for many of us reading and writing those long and complex texts that are the basis of human culture. Weinberger thinks that the Internet – thanks to the multiplication and celerity of its communication channels – is unfolding new and exciting perspectives for human knowledge, no longer adequately supported by traditional documents and “experts”. In the author's opinion both these theories are erroneous, being too radical and sharing a number of fallacies, e.g. a technological determinism and the tendency to consider certain characteristics as peculiar of a very few media, while they actually belong to a lot of different media.