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

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010)

There’s a valid point to the statement that is the basic premise for this book, namely that the instant gratification of using the endless resources and distractions of the Internet does something to your attention span. What attracted me to Carr’s book is the fact that he talks about being a literary scholar who suddenly no longer has the patience for reading the bigger tomes. That’s his starting point, but it’s not the whole story.

The Shallows makes the argument that there’s something inherently seductive about the way you have endless, boundless amounts of information at the tips of your fingers when Online but that the cornucopia of connections and information and quick communications actually comes at a price. It’s like the golden rule of mechanics says: whatever you lose in power you gain in displacement. There are other forces at work here, of course, like the illusion the Net can give you of being a part of an endless, immediate now that serves to make you feel a part of the bigger picture.

Carr grounds his reasoning in Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote “the medium is the message” – and the important thing about that quote is that it spotlights the often neglected or misunderstood core meaning: it’s not about the content, it’s about the actual medium, in this case the Net itself. Tricky business, since we all get seduced by the content and lose track of what the medium is doing when we’re not looking. Carr points out the bidirectionality of the Net as one of it’s selling points, for instance, and that’s hardly something you can argue, as a user. We like the feeling of being connected and that means that both the immediacy and the bidirectionality adds to the appeal of the medium.

Carr takes the long way around, starting with what cuneiform did for communication and what writing in general does, what the watch did for the industrial paradigm, what the map did for navigation, what the typewriter did for authors like Nietzsche and T.S. Eliot and so on.

The thing about Carr’s argument that makes it so interesting is that he discusses neuroplasticity and how the brain develops habits of concentration or distraction, without promoting one or the other. The brain makes no difference between “good” and “bad” habits, it simply does its thing. There’s still going to be some things that seem quantifiably better, like focus over distraction, but from a neurological point of view it’s just difference, not hierarchy. Deep reading has it’s rewards, but so does the roving gaze.

One of the most important lessons we’ve learned from the study of neuroplasticity is that the mental capacities, the very neurological circuits, we develop for one purpose can be put to other uses as well. (p. 75)

There are paradoxes to our use of the Internet, as Carr points out, but one of the sticking points is that the Net is good at grabbing our attention only to scatter it. It is in this scattering that we suddenly hit the point where we become less able to focus on one single thing. We have all the information in the world at our fingertips, but it’s like trying to pour a lake in a thimble, we can’t hold on to any of it because we’re constantly being distracted by something else, something new and shiny.

Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter out thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious. (p. 132) Carr states.

The appeal of the The Shallows isn’t that it tells you something you don’t already know, that technology does things to the user, changes habits and behavioural patterns, but rather it shines a spotlight on these things and makes you question your own relationship to technology, and makes you think about your own behaviour. For me the point quite quickly becomes not letting your use of the Net become unreflective, ignoring source criticism and simply surfing the shallows instead of keeping your reflective mind engaged. And that’s something we all need to be reminded of at times.

All in all The Shallows is entertaining, well-written and thought provoking. It also offers some insights into what happens to our grey matter when we use the medium available to us. Knowing these things makes us slightly less likely to be seduced by it to the point where we don’t see the drawbacks.

Mule

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