One of the decisions I made when writing my book was that I wouldn't attack the work of people who've written about digital distraction, even when I disagreed with them. It can be fun to read someone who enjoys criticizing other people and does it well (paging Evgeny Morozov), but I realized that I was more content positioning The Distraction Addiction as a "Yes, and…" (as they say in improv) to The Shallows or Alone Together or other books.

The Internet is changing the way we think? Yes, and… we can take charge of that process.

All media innovations, including printed books, have been greeted as apocalyptic changes in civilization and our capacity to think? Yes, and… there's a long history of developing new contemplative practices to deal with the problems those media create.

You get the idea. This came to mind today as I was reading a 2010 article in the Observer about Clay Shirky:

Mr. Shirky has recently found himself mulling over the computer scientist Jaron Lanier’s book, You Are Not a Gadget, in which Mr. Lanier criticizes the Internet’s propensity for groupthink, shoddy group collaboration and “digital Maoism”; and technology journalist Nicholas Carr’s just-published book The Shallows, which argues that as the Internet replaces print, the new medium is rewiring our brains and wrecking our ability to focus deeply.

“What’s interesting to me is that I’m reading those books and nodding my head right up until the moment comes for the authors to say, ‘Here’s what we ought to do about it,’” said Mr. Shirky. “The stuff that Nick says is wrong with the Internet is wrong with the Internet. The distraction is, I think, the biggest problem. But what’s interesting about The Shallows is that it doesn’t actually propose what to do about it.” (“My interest is description, not prescription,” retorted Mr. Carr in an email.)

As far as I'm concerned, prescription is what's really interesting. I'm certainly glad that Nick Carr wrote The Shallows; I think for all its flaws, it's a great first pass at describing the problem we have living with always-on devices. But at the same time, I firmly believe that you can't describe the problem adequately unless you've grappled with the problem of solving it.