Although the book still remains (unread) in my Amazon Wishlist, Nicholas Carr‘s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains has been thoughtfully scrutinized by assistant professor Zeynep Tufekci. Here’s one of the memorable paragraphs from the review in which Tufekci discusses (or rather contests) contemporary online pop-culture (or ‘memetics’) as the evidence for the decline of intellectualism:

We are a deeply social species and we engage in “social grooming” all the time, i.e. acts that have no particular informational importance but are about connecting, forming, displaying and strengthening bonds, affirming and challenging status, creating alliances, gossiping, exchanging tidbits about rhythms of life. I personally doubt that there is substantially more social grooming going on today, on average, compared to the pre-Internet era. The only difference is that the Internet makes it visible. What used to be spoken is now written and published potentially for the world to see. That’s it. There isn’t more or less of it. What has happened has resulted in the shuffling of the traditional understandings of private and the public, and as such, it has enormous consequences but it does not signal that we are dumbing down. We were always this dumb.

The full critique can be found here.