Cover via Amazon
Last year, I noticed that a new genre of nonfiction book had been born. They were the “higher education is off-course” books. In fact, I read parts of many of them. Each painted a gloomy picture for the future of higher education. Perhaps today’s activism to reform higher education is the outgrowth of those books.
If so, we should brace ourselves for a reform of the digital age. At a talk today, I became aware of another new genre: the “digital technology is rotting our minds” theme, such as Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, Nicholas Carr‘s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
It makes me wonder why Americans like to read books that tell frightening tales of the dangers of our everyday activities – and then go on doing them while preaching the danger to others. Weird.
