Post 9 - Davis

     Though I do agree with the rest of the class in my opinion that Nicholas Carr's argument in The Shallows was fundamentally ineffective and flawed when viewed as a whole, I think that the beginning of the book serves as the height of the work, and subsequent chapters steadily diminish in quality. Among Carr's more interesting tangents on the subject of human VS. machine thought processes, I found his perpetual referencing of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey in chapter 1 to be particularly insightful and thought provoking. By quoting the scene depicting HAL's climactic demise in the film, "Dave, my mind is going... I can feel it..." (page 5), Carr manages to effectively grasp readers' attention through dramatic use of literary scripting, while at the same time efficaciously introducing them to the book's primary thesis; our continual reliance on the internet as a means of data collecting will cause our brains to emulate their processes and bring an end to human thought as we know it, just as HAL's emulation of human processes led him to his end.