The Shalllows

 I didn't think I would from the moment I saw the title, but I was very surprised (and taken aback) by how much I liked this book. I figured it would be about some guy who "discovered" the Internet all by himself, but it got way deeper than that, and I was impressed with how the whole thing unfolded.


There were some great quotes in this.

"Socrates was right. As people grew accustomed to writing down their thoughts and reading the thoughts others had written down, they became less dependent on the their own memory."

I guess, once I read this, I realized that it was genius, and that I had always, in the back of my head, 'known' for myself, but it was great to hear it confirmed by an author.

"The reliance on personal memory diminished further with  the spread of the letterpress..." and then it hit me that everything was coming together this year, like what Toolin was trying to show us, and what Rosenberg was trying to do. And I can't believe it all worked out in the end.

There really were some great quotes in this book. p. 72: "Such qualifications deserve  note--any generalization about the adoption and use of a new technology will be imperfect--but they don't change the fact that the arrival of moveable-type printing was a central event in the history of Western culture and the development of the Western mind." I get the importance of moveable type to our very existence, or, rather, our current place in life, but I never thought about how much it effected my own personal mind. it's kind of creepy, but mostly pretty cool.

And as if Bruce Friedman knew me, and read my thoughts on one thing that I thought I was totally alone about: "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print."

It may be pretty obvious that this is happening to everyone who comes into contact with the World Wide Web, so I guess I can relax...for now.