“The Shallows” (2010) by Nicholas Carr is subtitled “What the Internet is doing to our brains”. The outlook is not good. “I could have told you that!” my mother said, who grew up without electricity and then saw television turn into a vast wasteland. The Internet is just the new kid on the block. Carr takes a longer view, back to the invention of the alphabet.
Note: This post is based on the 2010 edition, the one with a white cover. In 2020 he came out with a second edition, with a yellow cover. I was not interested in reading his argument updated with spackle.
The Internet is a mile wide and an inch deep. And so is the style of thought it favours. Carr mainly bases his argument on scientific studies by psychologists, making two points:
- The brain is plastic. Like muscles, its various parts strengthen through use, weaken through disuse. This is true not just when you are growing up, but even when you are old. Use it or lose it. It is not just digital natives who are affected. Even analogue girls in the digital world.
- The Internet does not favour deep thought. As T.S. Eliot would say, one is “distracted from distraction by distraction”. Or, as Cory Doctorow puts it, it is an “ecosystem of interruption technologies”. One is constantly distracted, particularly by email. It is hard to read anything of any length – the very reason I limit posts (optimistically) to 500 words. It is also hard to write anything of any length – the reason Carr himself had to partly wean himself from the Internet just to write the book.
As seen on the Internet, circa 2012 AD.
Cheerleaders and curmudgeons: With any new technology, there are going to be boosters and doomsters. Even writing had its doomsayers, predicting it would weaken our power of memory – a complaint Carr himself makes about the Internet! Carr also laments the effect GPS will have on the hippocampus of London taxi drivers.
But what does the science say? In 2009 Patricia Greenfield, a developmental psychologist at UCLA, reviewed over 50 studies of how different kinds of media affect learning and intelligence. Carr summarizes:
“The Net is making us smarter, in other words, only if we define intelligence by the Net’s own standards. If we take a broader and more traditional view of intelligence – if we think about the depth of our thought rather than just its speed – we have to come to a different and considerably darker conclusion.”
Even in tests of reading comprehension, paper is better than the Internet.
The Internet is moulding our minds to make them good at – using the Internet. Google’s vast data farms and powerful search engine lead people to – pages where most spend less than 30 seconds. For an average person that comes to 150 words (equal to 30% of this post). And then it is onward to the next snippet. And all you are left with is a pile of snippets because there is nothing to fit them into a broader picture – like a book would.
– Abagond, 2021.
See also:
- books
- books I read in 2021
- Internet
- alphabet
- paper
- Erykah Badu – for those who missed the Erykah Badu reference
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Abagond 
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