You know you're officially a nerd when one of your favourite - and most inspired - moments of the summer is when you receive and start to tackle your fall reading list (you also know you're a nerd when you Google "university nerd" and your picture literally comes up on the 15th page or so - my family assures me that this actually happens, although I can't seem to find myself). In any case, and notwithstanding the aside, I am really pumped so far with what I've read for my courses this fall.
This year's reading list is especially notable because I'm starting a new chapter in my life, so to speak (and if you'll excuse the pun). I'm starting my Master's degree and moving to a new city. In this new city I'm going to be focusing on Rhetoric and Communications as opposed to my undergrad focus of English literature. So I'm going to be reading a lot more non-fiction, which makes me happy-sad. I love fiction, but I'm ready for a new challenge and a more "real-world" topic of study.
To start with I've read Plato's Phaedrus for my Rhetoric class and for my Memory and Techne class (two birds, one stone - awesome!). The part I found the most interesting in this work is Socrates reference to writing as a tool that will lead to the deterioration of human memory, because we will begin to rely on this external aid, rather than our own internal cues.This point also ties in to a book I just finished today: Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Carr's book examines how the malleable human brain is literally being reshaped by Internet usage. There's also an interesting section at the end of the book that addresses Socrates remark in Pheadrus in relation to the World Wide Web. Essentially, some scholars argue that we're beginning to rely too heavily on external sources rather than our own internal cues, which is wreaking havoc on the human brain. According to Carr's novel, the compression of long-term memories are key in order to improve one's overall level of intelligence. The internet not only makes it more difficult for us to compress short-term memories and turn them in to long-term ones, it also prevents us from achieving our full intellectual capacity which is reached through the use of memory. Furthermore, according to Carr, the Web also encourages us to read superficially and not delve too deeply into any source.
I don't necessarily agree with everything that Carr states, but there are certainly a lot of interesting points made in Carr's book that are worth mulling over. I really recommend The Shallows for anyone who is interested in the intersection of psychology and technology. I will be writing more about Carr's text in relation to other works about memory and the web in a few months time, because I will be starting a blog for my Memory and Techne class (memoryandtechne.wordpress.com, if anyone would like to check it out). This new blog is going to be quite time-consuming, so Alice may need to be put on the back-burner for a few months. However, until then I wanted to jot down a few words about how excited I am about the next few months and all the awesome texts that I'm going to get to interpret and discuss with some new faces. I'm feeling inspired to begin my new life and to roll up my sleeves and get back to the books. This summer break has seemed like a long one!
