I found 2 books and a song that examine one of the most important topics in contemporary culture—the mental and social transformation created by our new electronic environment.

The first book is The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, and it is an astute critique of the ‘information technology revolution’. Witty, ambitious, and immensely readable, The Shallows actually manages to describe the weird, new, artificial world in which we now live. Carr looks to neurological science to gauge the organic impact of computers, citing fascinating experiments that contrast the neural pathways built by reading books versus those forged by surfing the hypnotic Internet. Where portals lead us on from one text, image, or video to another while we’re being bombarded by messages, alerts, and feeds. This glimmering realm of interruption and distraction impedes the sort of comprehension and retention “deep reading” engenders, Carr explains. And not only are we reconfiguring our brains, we are also forging a “new intellectual ethic,”. What are the consequences of new habits of the mind that abandon sustained immersion and concentration for darting about, snagging bits of information? What is gained and what is lost?

The second book follows a completely different argumentative route. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last. The author reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia, to lifesaving ones such as Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time. Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus, rather than being some strange new departure from normal behavior, actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up through the early twentieth century. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus, aided by new technologies, will have on twenty first century society, and how we can best exploit those effects. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization.

I left a song for the end; let it be the soundtrack of our times.

Cause I'm a 21st century digital boy

I don't know how to read but I got alot of toys

my daddy's a lazy middle class intellectual

my mommy's on valium, so ineffectual

ain't life a mystery yeah?

Tried to tell you about no control

but now I really don't know

and then you told me how bad you had to suffer

is that really all you had to offer?

Taken from “21st Century Digital Boy” by Bad religion.