The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010)

by Nicholas Carr

It would be an ironic subversion of the intent of The Shallows to present a paragraph-per-chapter summary of Carr’s insightful and prescient 2010 book like this one:

The way content is delivered is ultimately more important than the actual content delivered, a thought famously rendered in 1964 by media philosopher Marshall McLuhan as the medium is the message. The digital transformation has overhauled content delivery in the blink of an eye.

If you still think of the adult brain as a static or strictly-decaying entity, stop. Our brains are exceptionally plastic, constantly reforming based on experiences to strengthen used pathways and decommission unused pathways.

There is ample precedent for the assertion that technology fundamentally changes human culture and patterns of cognition. Previously the map encouraged spatial thinking; the clock encouraged regimented scientific thinking; the written word encouraged the augmentation (or, as Socrates argues, the diminishing) of memory and allowed us to break into a new paradigm of thought and communication.

In this new paradigm the effects of the mass-produced book cannot be understated. The personal, contemplative, focused and linear thinking demanded by the book shaped those same qualities in the reader and in the world around it.

The Internet (capital “I”) is our new channel for everything—text, audio, video, social interaction—pushing traditional siloed media to the margins and making them alter their content to cater to the patterns of consumption encouraged by the Net or killing them entirely.

No, the book is not immune. People have [unsuccessfully] tried to reshape it for centuries but indeed finally it may be reshaped by digital media in both form and function as the ways readers and writers interact with the content and with each other develop.

We don’t “read” on the internet. We skim, we forage. Hyperlinks and multimedia worsen retention. The multitasking encouraged by a digital life inhibits the unconscious process of forming an understanding. Consider sleeping on a difficult problem and awakening to the solution: this phenomenon is well-documented and is an indicator of how true understanding is formed—but this process cannot take place without conscious intent acting as shepherd to deliver the problem to the unconscious. When we surf on the surface of content we never establish that intent and our brain’s unconscious processes remain idle.

Google is the torchbearer of the information age, the representative spearhead of the ethos of web technology. That organization’s explicit view is that the human mind is a machine that could only benefit from increased efficiency of data access and consumption. This view—in reality backed by click-driven advertising revenue—underpins the architecture of the web as an intentionally distracting machine.

Memory is not rote. The process of forming long-term memories is physical and requires attention, intent, and time. Socrates’ prediction that a new technology would regress our mental capacity back to a more animal state may be right after all, but that technology wasn’t the book, it was the networked computer. The reduced pedagogical emphasis on memorization (it’s “obsolete”) represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the brain: we cannot simply be information processing machines as our working memory is naturally quite small. The brain has developed sophisticated unconscious information ingestion routines to compensate for this. By not relying on long-term memory, only working memory, we are engaging only a part of the whole. To memorize a thing is to know that thing.

Tools necessarily numb the natural senses they extend—the driver is less intimately aware of his terrain than the walker—and cognitive tools are no exception. We must be vigilant to this encroaching numbness and not let cognitive tools suppress our most human characteristics of contemplation and compassion nor let superficial mechanical mastery supplant wisdom in its place atop our society.

If any part of this summary resonates with you I’d wholeheartedly recommend reading the real thing. The arguments are much more convincing when delivered in long-form prose with a profusion of citations. These references include countless publications authored by scientists and technologists counterbalanced by those from literary figures and philosophers including Socrates, Descartes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nietzsche, Heidegger, McLuhan.

Oddly enough, this book was recommended to me by a colleague at my high-tech Silicon Valley day job. There is an unsettling dissonance forming in my head between my idealistic conception of my chosen career and my increasing knowledge of its true form. Carr’s cogent conclusions reinforce and solidify many of the vague misgivings about web technology’s role I’d intuited from own experiences as a user and creator of it. There’s bound to be a way to reconcile that disagreement. I couldn’t tell you at this time what exactly it might comprise but I can say that the road towards such a solution starts with books like The Shallows.