The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains

Nicholas Carr

May 2010 · W. W. Norton & Company

About this ebook

Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”—Michael Agger, Slate

Finalist for the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award

“Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?

Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.

Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.

Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

Ratings and reviews

A very compelling and timely read. The author makes a great case for why and how technology may be meddling with our brain power. It would have been a more useful book had he also been able to highlight some study/research/techniques/ideas on how to continue to abide in a technological world without letting it overpower us while also not isolating oneself from what it has to offers. Based on everything the author has to say the answer kind of seems obvious, even if not very practical.

The question is whether people are losing their minds or society is constructing a new type of one. Tools have sticky cognitive effects on their users and the internet, while figuratively turning on the light for many, may also tend to make it harder to look as deeply as before. In order to write the book, the author attempted to disconnect and find seclusion for a while. He cites how changes of this magnitude have been perceived in the past, e.g. Socrates’ lament that writing destroyed the capacity for individual memory, or how the typewriter changed authors’ styles since they could not dwell on the feeling of writing in longhand. Information is meted out in lots of brief interlinked pieces. Email has become streams. Ads are pervasive. The ten chapters review the mind, book, maps, clocks, tech, computers, and AI, amid the dimension of networking. Rather than point to URLs, the story is told in flashbacks, e.g. how Weizenbaum’s ELIZA could earn the empathic confidence of people even though it was mindless. There are ten chapters and four digressions, the last of which looks at the irony of a book on the disappearance of long-term concentration. Notes and further reading are appended. Much of these are valid issues and worth further study. Whether the realtime flow and exponential increase in data to analyze can be paused often or enough is unknown. More direct types of mind links may not be too far off in the future. For the attention-challenged, a way to get through this book might be to survey it quickly, then skim a few times to make raw impressions, not word for word, rather similar to becoming familiar with a song or painting, then read it backwards for the verbal reassurance. The reader can increase the pass-throughs to pick up more detail where necessary and as time allows, thereby rendering textual memory as well as consideration and opinion. It may turn out that reading is more of a creative process than previously thought, or that there are better tools for the task, as there are for other kinds of digital composition, e.g. like sculpting 3D art. It may then still be possible to frequently parse titles in dedicated slices while otherwise attending to the network. Eventually a learning process may be discovered, akin to development of Gladwell’s outlier mastery status, And, of course, each of the chapters can become a book or digital museum or web-service in the interim, so none of the 3R’s may remain sacrosanct for much longer. There may be a video about this floating around somewhere.

A lot of what Carr says is on target and supports the notion that our culture is quickly becoming less interested in substance and more interested in flash. However, Carr seems to sound as panicky as many people in the past have when addressing new technologies. The truth is that a lot of the literature available prior to the internet, television, and radio was crap. So there is a good chance that many of the people who consumed crap in one medium are just doing so in another. While the folks who were reading the substance will still continue to do so.

About the author

Nicholas Carr is the best-selling author of The Shallows, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Big Switch, and Does IT Matter? His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and The New Republic. He has been writer-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley, and an executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. He lives in Colorado.