The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr | eBook

Daniel Menaker

Just to give you advance notice, the following words are not a typographical or technological error: Whatifthebeginningofthispiecehadbeenwrittenlikethisyouwouldhavehadtosortofreadit outloudtoyourselfinordertounderstanditright?

In the early pages of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr, the author of two previous and for the most part socially nonjudgmental books about the Web, reviews the enormous change that simply putting spaces between words, beginning somewhere around 1000 AD, made to the act and nature of reading. Before that absolutely brilliant invention, reading had to be done -- and was meant to be done -- more or less out loud. With the insertion of spaces (and the arrival of paragraphs and punctuation and standard word orders), reading began its transformation into something else entirely -- a deep, silent, much more rapid but also far more intellectually immersive act. "Readers [now] disengaged their attention from the outward flow of stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions," Carr writes. He also points out that this transformation "required complex changes in the circuitry of the brain, as contemporary studies of young readers show."

If you didn't realize this before, think about it now. It makes such intellectually dramatic sense. And it works as an excellent foundation for the main argument of this generally excellent and important book (which is an expansion of a widely-read piece Carr did not long ago for The Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"). That argument is:

Neuroscientists have now irrefutably shown that our brains change their structure and function even after maturity, depending on what we do or don't use them for. This property of changeability is called neuroplasticity. This term is getting famous, and it should be.

Every technological development that affects our process of cognition affects the physical nature and abilities of our brains. For instance, the invention of maps enormously expanded our understanding of certain aspects and measurements of geography, but it also (to use a term that Carr borrows from Marshall McLuhan) "numbed" our immediate sensory experience of the "lay of the land," just as high-speed travel does. GPSs can save lives, but their routine use topographically numbs us further.

The necessity and ability to concentrate on a single task, intellectual or otherwise, is crucial for the formation of deep, long-term memories that ultimately enrich each other and produce what we call wisdom. Scientific research on the cellular level has shown that deep and concentrated cognitive exercise changes the synapses between neurons and the structures of the neurons themselves.

The advent of the Internet has given us some wonderfully valuable new tools. You're using one right now, as you do when you print out a boarding pass at home, or find a recipe for rhubarb crisp, or listen to streaming music of a sort tailored to your personal preferences, or watch an episode of The Good Wife that you missed when it was first broadcast. Or find your own good wife, for that matter.

But the Web's accompanying distractions and multi-tasking and data acceleration threaten our society's longstanding practice of and esteem for deep thought and reflection. The influx of competing messages that we receive?whenever we go online not only overloads our working?memory, it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to?concentrate on any one thing. And thanks?once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the?more we use the Web, the more we train our brains to be distracted, to process information very quickly, but?without sustained attention.

Finally, Carr concludes, "One of the greatest dangers we face as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system is … a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity."

Usually, I call this kind of doomy pronouncement "geezer talk," because it's what old people tend to indulge in as they fail to face -- and instead displace -- their own fears of death onto the state of the world as a whole. My parents did, yours probably did -- or do -- too. Not that Mr. Carr is old. He's about fifty, a former editor of the Harvard Business Review whose previous, comparatively neutral attitude toward the technological revolution seems now to have given way to the values of his still earlier incarnation as a Harvard MA in English and American Literature and Language. Because in The Shallows, he clearly and deeply values creative, literary, and philosophical endeavor above all others; he worries about their future, and proves, to my satisfaction anyway, that he is right to worry. This book is not geezer talk, then -- it's required reading for anyone who wants a cogent, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched statement of the techno-fears that, in however inchoate a way, many of us have harbored for going on a few decades now.

Two reservations -- one minor, the other more apocalyptic than geezer talk. The Shallows repeats a couple of its basic ideas more than it needs to, especially the McLuhanite concept that the medium eventually shapes us as much as, if not more than, we shape it. (By the way, when I just typed "the," this word-processing program suggested "themselves" as a convenient Enter shortcut. The. Just did it again. And when I typed in "pro," it suggested "process" instead of "program." Carr brilliantly analyzes the implications of this sort of "helpful" HAL-like technological usurpation.)

The other, more apocalyptic reservation: in saying that we are in danger of losing our "humanness" to the Internet and electronica in general, Carr is choosing to emphasize -- in fact, to posit as central and essential -- certain aspects of that humanness, while ignoring others, which I consider, in my amateur way, and very sadly, just as central and essential. I am talking about our species's tendency to constantly develop and invent and do things not only inimical to our better natures, but threatening to our very existence. To wit: environmental havoc, horrific weaponry, religious zealotry, overpopulation, dietary atrocities, greed. The very cortices and hippocampi and parietal lobes and such, whose higher, deeper functions Carr sees imperiled by the Internet, are what created the Internet in the first place. So wouldn't it be more accurate to say that we are allowing one (destructive) aspect of our humanness to beat up another (sublime) one? I'm afraid so.

--Daniel Menaker

Jonah Lehrer

While Carr tries to ground his argument in the details of modern neuroscience, his most powerful points have nothing do with our plastic cortex. Instead, The Shallows is most successful when Carr sticks to cultural criticism, as he documents the losses that accompany the arrival of new technologies.
—The New York Times

Newsweek

A must-read for any desk jockey concerned about the Web’s deleterious effects on the mind.

San Francisco Chronicle

This is a lovely story well told—an ode to a quieter, less frenetic time when reading was more than skimming and thought was more than mere recitation.

The 2011 Pulitzer Prize Committee

A thought provoking exploration of the Internet’s physical and cultural consequences, rendering highly technical material intelligible to the general reader.

Salon

The Shallows certainly isn't the first examination of this subject, but it's more lucid, concise and pertinent than similar works ... An essential, accessible dispatch about how we think now.— Laura Miller

BusinessWeek

Persuasive ... A prolific blogger, tech pundit, and author, [Carr] cites enough academic research in The Shallows to give anyone pause about society's full embrace of the Internet as an unadulterated force for progress . . . Carr lays out, in engaging, accessible prose, the science that may explain these results.— Peter Burrows

Chicago Tribune

Another reason for book lovers not to throw in the towel quite yet is The Shallows...a quietly eloquent retort to those who claim that digital culture is harmless—who claim, in fact, that we're getting smarter by the minute just because we can plug in a computer and allow ourselves to get lost in the funhouse of endless hyperlinks.— Julia Keller

Financial Times

The subtitle of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition of those published in the 1950s about how rock ’n’ roll was corrupting the nation’s youth ... But this is no such book. It is a patient and rewarding popularization of some of the research being done at the frontiers of brain science ... Mild-mannered, never polemical, with nothing of the Luddite about him, Carr makes his points with a lot of apt citations and wide-ranging erudition.— Christopher Caldwell

Information Week

You really should read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows . . . Far from offering a series of rants on the dangers of new media, Carr spends chapters walking us through a variety of historical experiments and laymen's explanations on the workings of the brain . . . He makes the research stand on end, punctuating it with pithy conclusions and clever phrasing.— Fritz Nelson

Wall Street Journal

Absorbing [and] disturbing. We all joke about how the Internet is turning us, and especially our kids, into fast-twitch airheads incapable of profound cogitation. It's no joke, Mr. Carr insists, and he has me persuaded.— John Horgan

The New York Times Book Review

This is a measured manifesto. Even as Carr bemoans his vanishing attention span, he’s careful to note the usefulness of the Internet, which provides us with access to a near infinitude of information. We might be consigned to the intellectual shallows, but these shallows are as wide as a vast ocean.— Jonah Lehrer

Ellen Wernecke

The Shallows isn’t McLuhan’s Understanding Media, but the curiosity rather than trepidation with which Carr reports on the effects of online culture pulls him well into line with his predecessor . . . Carr’s ability to crosscut between cognitive studies involving monkeys and eerily prescient prefigurations of the modern computer opens a line of inquiry into the relationship between human and technology.”

Jonathan Safran Foer

The best book I read last year — and by “best” I really just mean the book that made the strongest impression on me — was The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr. Like most people, I had some strong intuitions about how my life and the world have been changing in response to the Internet. But I could neither put those intuitions into an argument, nor be sure that they had any basis in the first place. Carr persuasively — and with great subtlety and beauty — makes the case that it is not only the content of our thoughts that are radically altered by phones and computers, but the structure of our brains — our ability to have certain kinds of thoughts and experiences. And the kinds of thoughts and experiences at stake are those that have defined our humanity. Carr is not a proselytizer, and he is no techno-troglodyte. He is a profoundly sharp thinker and writer — equal parts journalist, psychologist, popular science writer, and philosopher. I have not only given this book to numerous friends, I actually changed my life in response to it.”

Matthew B. Crawford

The core of education is this: developing the capacity to concentrate. The fruits of this capacity we call civilization. But all that is finished, perhaps. Welcome to the shallows, where the un-educating of homo sapiens begins. Nicholas Carr does a wonderful job synthesizing the recent cognitive research. In doing so, he gently refutes the ideologists of progress, and shows what is really at stake in the daily habits of our wired lives: the re-constitution of our minds. What emerges for the reader, inexorably, is the suspicion that we have well and truly screwed ourselves.

Dana Gioia

Nicholas Carr carefully examines the most important topic in contemporary culture—the mental and social transformation created by our new electronic environment. Without ever losing sight of the larger questions at stake, he calmly demolishes the clichés that have dominated discussions about the Internet. Witty, ambitious, and immensely readable, The Shallows actually manages to describe the weird, new, artificial world in which we now live.”

Tom Vanderbilt

Neither a tub-thumpingly alarmist jeremiad nor a breathlessly Panglossian ode to the digital self, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is a deeply thoughtful, surprising exploration of our “frenzied” psyches in the age of the Internet. Whether you do it in pixels or pages, read this book.”

Maryanne Wolf

Ultimately, The Shallows is a book about the preservation of the human capacity for contemplation and wisdom, in an epoch where both appear increasingly threatened. Nick Carr provides a thought-provoking and intellectually courageous account of how the medium of the Internet is changing the way we think now and how future generations will or will not think. Few works could be more important.”

Elizabeth Kolbert

Nicholas Carr has written an important and timely book. See if you can stay off the web long enough to read it!

Laura Miller - Salon

The Shallows certainly isn't the first examination of this subject, but it's more lucid, concise and pertinent than similar works ... An essential, accessible dispatch about how we think now.”

Peter Burrows - BusinessWeek

Persuasive ... A prolific blogger, tech pundit, and author, [Carr] cites enough academic research in The Shallows to give anyone pause about society's full embrace of the Internet as an unadulterated force for progress . . . Carr lays out, in engaging, accessible prose, the science that may explain these results.”

Julia Keller - Chicago Tribune

Another reason for book lovers not to throw in the towel quite yet is The Shallows...a quietly eloquent retort to those who claim that digital culture is harmless—who claim, in fact, that we're getting smarter by the minute just because we can plug in a computer and allow ourselves to get lost in the funhouse of endless hyperlinks.”

Christopher Caldwell - Financial Times

The subtitle of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition of those published in the 1950s about how rock ’n’ roll was corrupting the nation’s youth ... But this is no such book. It is a patient and rewarding popularization of some of the research being done at the frontiers of brain science ... Mild-mannered, never polemical, with nothing of the Luddite about him, Carr makes his points with a lot of apt citations and wide-ranging erudition.”

Fritz Nelson - Information Week

You really should read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows . . . Far from offering a series of rants on the dangers of new media, Carr spends chapters walking us through a variety of historical experiments and laymen's explanations on the workings of the brain . . . He makes the research stand on end, punctuating it with pithy conclusions and clever phrasing.”

John Horgan - Wall Street Journal

Jonah Lehrer - The New York Times Book Review

Library Journal

Expanding on his provocative Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," technology writer Carr (The Big Switch) provides a deep, enlightening examination of how the Internet influences the brain and its neural pathways. Computers have altered the way we work; how we organize information, share news and stories, and communicate; and how we search for, read, and absorb information. Carr's analysis incorporates a wealth of neuroscience and other research, as well as philosophy, science, history, and cultural developments. He investigates how the media and tools we use (including libraries) shape the development of our thinking and considers how we relate to and think about our brains. Carr also examines the impact of online searching on memory and explores the overall impact that the tools and media we use have on memory formation. His fantastic investigation of the effect of the Internet on our neurological selves concludes with a very humanistic petition for balancing our human and computer interactions. VERDICT Neuroscience and technology buffs, librarians, and Internet users will find this truly compelling. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/10; seven-city tour.]—Candice Kail, Columbia Univ. Libs., New York

Kirkus Reviews

"Is Google making us stupid?" So freelance technology writer Carr (The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, 2008, etc.) asked in a 2008 article in the Atlantic Monthly, an argument extended in this book. The subtitle is literal. In the interaction between humans and machines, the author writes, machines are becoming more humanlike. And, "as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence." Carr provides evidence from batteries of neuroscientific research projects, which suggest that the more we use the Internet as an appendage of memory, the less we remember, and the more we use it as an aide to thinking, the less we think. Though the author ably negotiates the shoals of scientific work, his argument also takes on Sven Birkerts-like cultural dimensions. The Internet, he complains, grants us access to huge amounts of data, but this unmediated, undigested stuff works against systematic learning and knowledge. Yale computer-science professor David Gelernter has lately made the same arguments in a more gnomic, but much shorter, essay now making the rounds of the Internet. This privileging of the short and bullet-pointed argument to the considered and leisurely fits into Carr's theme as well. He observes that with RSS, Twitter, Google and all the other cutely named distractions his computer provides, he has become a less patient and less careful reader of key texts that require real work. It's a sentiment that one of his subjects, a philosophy major and Rhodes Scholar, brushes aside, saying, "I don't read books . . . I go to Google, and I can absorb relevant information quickly." Ah, but there's the rub-how can a novice know what's relevant?Similar in spirit to Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget (2010)-cogent, urgent and well worth reading. Author tour to Denver/Boulder, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Austin, Texas. Agent: John Brockman

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