The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

5 thoughts on “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”

1. Review by William Timothy Lukeman for The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
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   In this short but informative, thought-provoking book, Nicholas Carr presents an argument I’ve long felt to be true on a humanist level, but supports it with considerable scientific research. In fact, he speaks as a longtime computer enthusiast, one who’s come to question what he once wholeheartedly embraced … and even now, he takes care to distinguish between the beneficial & detrimental aspects of the Internet.

   The argument in question?

   – Greater access to knowledge is not the same as greater knowledge.

   – An ever-increasing plethora of facts & data is not the same as wisdom.

   – Breadth of knowledge is not the same as depth of knowledge.

   – Multitasking is not the same as complexity.

   The studies that Carr presents are troubling, to say the least. From what has been gleaned to date, it’s clear that the brain retains a certain amount of plasticity throughout life — that is, it can be reshaped, and the way that we think can be reshaped, for good or for ill. Thus, if the brain is trained to respond to & take pleasure in the faster pace of the digital world, it is reshaped to favor that approach to experiencing the world as a whole. More, it comes to crave that experience, as the body increasingly craves more of anything it’s trained to respond to pleasurably & positively. The more you use a drug, the more you need to sustain even the basic rush.

   And where does that leave the mind shaped by deep reading? The mind that immerses itself in the universe of a book, rather than simply looking for a few key phrases & paragraphs? The mind that develops through slow, quiet contemplation, mulling over ideas in their entirety, and growing as a result? The mature mind that ponders possibilities & consequences, rather than simply going with the bright, dazzling, digital flow?

   Nowhere, it seems.

   Carr makes it clear that the digital world, like any other technology that undeniably makes parts of life so much easier, is here to stay. All the more reason, then, to approach it warily, suspiciously, and limit its use whenever possible, since it is so ubiquitous. “Yes, but,” many will say, “everything is moving so fast that we’ve got to adapt to it, keep up with it!” Not unlike the Red Queen commenting that it takes all of one’s energy & speed to simply remain in one place while running. But what sort of life is that? How much depth does it really have?

   Because some aspects of life — often the most meaningful & rewarding aspects — require time & depth. Yet the digital world constantly makes us break it into discrete, interchangeable bits that hurtle us forward so rapidly & inexorably that we simply don’t have time to stop & think. And before we know it, we’re unwilling & even unable to think. Not in any way that allows true self-awareness in any real context.

   Emerson once said (as aptly quoted by Carr), “Things are in the saddle / And ride mankind.” The danger is that we’ll not only willingly, even eagerly, wear those saddles, but that we’ll come to desire them & buckle them on ever more tightly, until we feel naked without them. And we’ll gladly pay anything to keep them there, even as we lose the capacity to wonder why we ever put them on in the first place.

   Most highly recommended!
   

2. Review by Shalom Freedman for The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
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   The Internet has made the information- universes of all of us much larger. At the same time it has altered the way we read, and the way we pay attention. The major thesis of this work is that it has made us shallower creatures. In Carr’s words,” We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information… And so we ask the Internet to keep interrupting us, in ever more and different ways. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive. Tuning out is not an option many of us would consider. (p. 133-4)” This means in effect that our powers of concentration and contemplation, if not diminished all at once, are nonetheless put less to use. It means that we do not really take in much of what we read and see, but rather let it pass by as something new comes to attract and distract us. It too means according to Carr transformations in actual brain- structure. And he uses the results of cognitive brain studies to point out how excessive use of the Internet reshapes our brain- structure.

   Carr argues that with the advent of reading humanity developed a different kind of neural structure. Reading which was an extension of story- telling enabled us to begin to speak to ourselves, to contemplate reality in deeper ways. The bookman mind is a deeper mind than the electronic – mind , despite MacLuhan’s contrary take.

   Still one might argue that we need not be the slaves of the predominant technology. It all depends upon the will, decision, determination of the individual. The horde may decide to operate in a certain way, but one has the power to shut the machine off. Or one has the power to turn away from the Net, and focus only on one text one wants to work with. Many of us are engaged in making these decisions all the time.
   
   Still I would say that my own experience substantiates Carr’s main thesis. I have wasted in the past few years far too much time, jumping from one thing to another.
   
   Nonetheless there is no turning back from the Revolution which Carr considers to be certainly the greatest since the introduction of the Printing press, and perhaps greatest since the introduction of the Alphabet and the Number System.

   Perhaps what is truly required is a ‘proper mix of both ways of ‘reading and seeing’ of both ‘modes of being’ i.e. the short- term internet attention mode, and the longer book- concentration mode. And this as I sense that when many begin to feel an exhaustion from the jumping around, come to understand it does not really help them in pursuit of their main goal, there will be some reaction in the other direction.

3. Review by A. A. Nikolov for The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
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   I familiarized myself with the work of Mr. Carr after I read his Does IT Matter? article for one of my graduate business classes. Since 2007, I am a regular reader of his blog, and I eagerly anticipated his previous book The Big Switch.

   His latest effort is another worthwhile read with important insights into what is happening to our minds in the age of the Internet. I, myself, have struggled with the same ideas and issues described in The Shallows and found it very relevant. The book provides great examples and scientific explanations about memory, brain plasticity, and recent advances in cognitive science. Maybe some of the examples and topics from the book would be familiar to followers of his blog, but now they are laid out in such a way, that larger implication emerge from the text.

4. Review by Adam Thierer for The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
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   Rich with historical anecdotes and replete with scientific surveys and evidence, “The Shallows” is a book that demands your respect whether you are comfortable giving it or not. And many people won’t be. After all, Carr is a bit of a skunk at the cyber-garden party. I mean, how dare he suggest that all is not wine and roses with our glorious new world of instantaneous connectivity, abundant information flows, and cheap (often free) media content! Obviously, most of us want to believe that all adds up to a more well-rounded worldview and greater wisdom about the world around us. Carr is skeptical of those claims and “The Shallows” is his latest effort to poke a hole in the cyber-utopian claims that sometimes pervade discussions about Internet. Although, ultimately, he doesn’t quite convinced me that “The Web is a technology of forgetfulness,” he has made a powerful case that its effects may not be as salubrious as many of us have assumed.

   But the ultimate question is: Do the costs really outweigh the benefits? Is it the case that these technologies “turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities — those for reason, perception, memory, emotion”? I think that goes a bit too far, however. Importantly, Carr doesn’t really ever answer the crucial question here: Were we really better off in the decades prior to the rise of the Net? Did we really read more and engage in the more contemplative deep-reading and thinking he Carr fears we are losing because of the Net? Count me among those who think that — whatever most of us are doing in front our our computers most nights, and no matter how distracting it is — it has to be better than much of the crap we wasted our spare time on in the past!

   It would have also been nice to have seen Carr offer up some personal suggestions for how we each might better manage cognitive overload, which can be a real problem. In a brief “digression” chapter entitled “On the Writing of This Book,” Carr does mention some of the steps he took personally to make sure he could complete “The Shallows” without being driven to distraction by the Web and digital technologies. But he doesn’t dwell on that much, which is a shame. A bit of a self-help can go a long way toward alleviating the worst forms of cognitive overload, although it will continue to be a struggle for many of us.

   Despite the reservations I’ve raised here, Nick Carr’s “The Shallows” is beautifully written and is my early favorite for the most important info-tech book of the year. It will be required reading in this field for many years to come. [You can find my complete review of Carr’s “The Shallows” over at the Technology Liberation Front blog.]
   

5. Review by Winston Smith for The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
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   If you truly want to know how technology (the Web in particular) is literally altering the functionality of our brains, buy this book. If not, go back to skimming webpages and pretend like nothing is happening.

   Some great quotes from the book (if you still have the ability to concentrate long enough to comprehend them):

   “Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in transferring information from working memory into long-term memory. By regulating the velocity and intensity of information flow, media exert a strong influence on this process. When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by the pace of our reading. Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer all or most of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of schemas. With the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from one faucet to the next. We’re able to transfer only a small portion of the information to long-term memory, and what we do transfer is a jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream from one source.”- The Shallows (page 125)

   “We can assume that the neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are expanding and strengthening while those used for reading and thinking deeply, with sustained concentration, are weakening or eroding. In 2009, researchers from Stanford University found signs that this shift may already be well underway. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light multitaskers. They found that heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted by irrelevant environmental stimuli,” had significantly less control over the contents of their working memory, and we in general much less able to maintain their concentration on a particular task. Whereas the infrequent multitaskers exhibited relatively strong “top-down attentional control,” the habitual multitaskers showed “a greater tendency for bottom-up attentional control, ” suggesting that “they are sacrificing performance on the primary task to let in other sources of information.” Intensive multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy,” commented Clifford Nass, the Stanford professor who led the research. “Everything distracts them.”- The Shallows (page 142)

   “Considering how much easier it is to search digital text than printed text, the common assumption has been that making journals available on the net would significantly broaden the scope of scholarly research, leading to a much more diverse set of citations. But that’s not at all what Evans [Sociologist of the University of Chicago] discovered. As more journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles that they had before. And as old issues of printed journals were digitized and uploaded to the Web, scholars cited more recent articles with increasing frequency. A broadening of available information led as Evans described it to a “narrowing of science and scholarship.” In explaining the counter intuitive findings in a 2008 `Science’ article, Evans noted that automated information-filtering tools, such as search engines, tend to serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn’t. “The ease of following hyperlinks, moreover, leads online researchers to “bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers” would routinely skim as they flip through the pages of a journal or book. The quicker that scholars are able to “find prevailing opinion,” wrote Evans, the more likely they are “to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles.” Though much less efficient than searching the Web, old-fashioned library research probably served to widen scholars horizons: “By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past.” – The Shallows (page 217)

   “Spending time in the park, the researchers found, “significantly improved” people’s performance on the cognitive tests, indicating a substantial increase in attentiveness. Walking in the city, by contrast, led to no improvement in test results.”- The Shallows (page 219)

   “In sum,” concluded the researches, “simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control.” Spending time in the natural world seems to be of “vital importance” to “effective cognitive functioning.”- The Shallows (page 220)

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