The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Nicholas Carr. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010. 276 pp.
Has technology ever been our friend? That’s been the debate every time humans have come up with new ways to tell their tales, from Ooog the Caveman and his cave-wall mastodon hunts, to the noise of the Tweets, twits and instant-messaging on the Internet. In Aldous Huxley’s version of the Brave New World, distraction—or misdirection—is the key: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts.” In this opening pair of essays, Tricia Farwell examines Nicholas Carr’s version of technology, friend or foe, in The Shallows, while Joseph Hayden considers Clay Shirky’s somewhat more optimistic interpretation in Cognitive Surplus—dueling perspectives on the latest edition of our brave new electronic world.
Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is founded in the author’s observations that his mind was no longer processing information as it once did. More specifically, he noticed that it was more of a struggle to read books and complex writing without having his mind wander.
The wandering mind may not be a new concept to anyone who is self-aware during his/her daily experiences, but making the connection between the growing lack of focus and Internet time may be. What this opening observation does for Carr’s book is to set us up to travel through arguments of how key technological advances have made changes not only to the way people think, but to the way our brains are structured. As we move through the book, we question whether we really are learning more online or if we are just being seduced by the instant access. Ultimately, Carr, a media-tech guru who has written several books on the Internet and technology—The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008) and Does IT Matter? (2004)—explains how changes in language, writing, books, time, and the Internet have changed us. Those changes may not be all good because they disconnect us, as Carr says: seduction by technological advancements has cost us some of our “human elements.”
Initially the structure of the book seemed to reflect Carr’s argument for people being unable to focus for extended periods, as he presents chapters followed by what he titles “a digression.” This would lead careful readers of his argument to expect an element of “See? I’m right”—a reward for the reader pointing to the fact that the only reason we’ve made it through the book was because the author knew how the human brain now functions under the influence of the net. Yet, that does not happen. No overt commentary is formed around the structure of the work, and how it could possibly strengthen the argument. Additionally, what starts out as a promising and interesting structural approach actually does not go deep enough to support the author’s point.
This lack of depth is also problematic in other sections. While the overall impression is of a well-researched, well-supported work, several chapters on the historical development of human brains and technology feel, to use the author’s concept, stuck in the shallows. Chapter 2, for example, which covers the development of our concepts of brain function, struggles with the amount and depth of scientific information needed to complete the argument.
Carr is not alone in his struggle over how much detail is needed when discussing scientific data, yet he may have erred on the side of not enough. Understandably, it is impossible to cover the changes in the conception of the human brain from static to ever-changing in just one chapter. However, Carr’s lack of depth—shallowness?—calls attention to what is missing.
Despite these weaknesses, Carr presents an interesting read, even if it is just on the level of making readers more aware of what is going on in their brains as they spend increasing time online. Readers see more clearly how technological advancements not only change the way we interact with the Internet and the world, but also how the technology is changing us. People now tweet and change status updates during play intermissions. Libraries are being designed around computer access. The physical changes to our reality by the always-on world are easy to see. What may be less evident to some, however, may be the changes within our brain, and how we think. Carr directs us to think about how the online environment may be impacting the way our brain functions and makes connections. The more time we spend online, the more the human brain is being conditioned to accommodate short bursts of information and distractions.
This is the new norm. Ultimately, Carr sees the changes from our previous ways to the way our brain is starting to structure itself as destructive because we are sacrificing individual thought to an online memory. In many ways, this book reiterates the fear that people are turning into machines and losing all that makes humans human. Yet, that may be something we still need to hear. That is, perhaps, Carr’s main contribution with this book—step back from the computer and unplug for a bit.
Tricia M. Farwell
Middle Tennessee State University