The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

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The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

3.8 of 5 stars 3.80 · rating details · 4,779 ratings · 976 reviews

“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

...more “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.

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Paperback, 280 pages

Published June 6th 2011 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published January 1st 2010)

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Mar 16, 2012 Amanda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

For the last few years, I've noticed that I seem to have developed a form of ADD. This was always the most apparent during the first few weeks of summer vacation when I would start and stop projects with lightning speed, when I couldn't sit still to read a book or watch a movie all the way through, when I couldn't clean my house all in one day, when I couldn't keep my mind on just one train of thought. As someone who had always lived for structure, who craved the routine and the predictable, who...more For the last few years, I've noticed that I seem to have developed a form of ADD. This was always the most apparent during the first few weeks of summer vacation when I would start and stop projects with lightning speed, when I couldn't sit still to read a book or watch a movie all the way through, when I couldn't clean my house all in one day, when I couldn't keep my mind on just one train of thought. As someone who had always lived for structure, who craved the routine and the predictable, who always finished one task completely and thoroughly before moving on to another, this was quite alarming to me. I blamed teaching. My mind had adapted to the need to deliver content, monitor student behavior, answer questions, pass out papers, remind everyone for the umpteenth time that classwork is to be turned in to the orange basket, run the PowerPoint, avoid saying anything that might get me fired (“do not tell little Johnny that there is such a thing as a stupid question and he just asked it”)--and the need to do so all at once. Turns out there may be something to my theory. And it turns out that this manner of thinking, the need to hyper-multitask, may be exacerbated by the rise of technology as a conduit to information. It’s comforting to know that, if I’m becoming stupid, it’s not entirely my fault.

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr questions the impact technology has upon our lives. What’s most important here is that Carr is in no way advocating a return to the pre-technology era. He admits that much good has been done and will be done by technology, and he fesses up to loving and relying on technology himself. However, he examines the idea of neuroplasticity—the idea that the brain rewires itself to adapt to the stimuli it encounters. During the age of the book, the brain had to rewire itself to be able to focus for long periods of time upon text and to think about that text deeply. This didn’t happen all at once, but was accelerated as books became more readily available to a more widely educated public. The mind became accustomed to taking in information intensely, if not rapidly, as the brain had time to ruminate on and process the information it encountered. The result was a deep thinking, literate individual. People became experts in specific areas and the keepers of knowledge associated with their particular field of specialty. They were responsible for filtering, critiquing, and judging the quality of new knowledge which had to be “vetted” before it could be accepted as accurate and true.

So what have we sacrificed in this age of point and click? We’re losing the idea of specialization, which is one of the more frightening aspects to me. Any idiot with access to a keyboard and an Internet connection can post anything they want online and it’s accepted as truth. A society that becomes accustomed to finding any and all information online may never learn anything deeply (and what will happen when Skynet becomes self-aware, takes over, and the machines rise against us, eh?) Instead, people will have little pockets of knowledge supplemented by what they can find online. Also, I have to wonder how many innovations and ideas were serendipitously created when answers weren’t easy to find. When an answer can be found through a quick web search, the deep thinking that may lead to phenomenal breakthroughs and intense creativity may be forfeited. In addition, our attention spans are suffering. We bounce from hyperlink to hyperlink, chasing new pieces of information which we scan quickly and, because we read over it so quickly, it’s never stored in our long-term memory. The next time we need that information we’ll have to log back on and find it again instead of relying on our ability to recall it.

Carr’s book is not the ramblings of an ill-informed radical. This book is well-researched and Carr traces how the human brain has evolved throughout history, including pre-technology, to show that neuroplasticity has allowed us to adapt to our ever-changing environments. There’s hard science here as well. If you don’t agree with Carr’s thesis by the end, there’s no denying that he's done his homework.

I love technology and I think Nicholas Carr does, too. Carr’s book is not an indictment of technology, but rather a call for the public to be cognizant of the ways in which technology is affecting us—both the good and the bad. Our society has so quickly and readily embraced technology that we haven’t thought about the potential long-term tradeoffs. When we think about it and realize, “Hey, wait a minute. This food I’ve planted on Farmville—I can’t eat one damn bit of it”, then we might become more responsible about how and when we use technology (and maybe we’ll go plant a garden in the backyard). I know that I, for one, have started logging off more frequently and making sure that the time I do spend online is enriching my life in some way.

Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder and at Shelf Inflicted (less)

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Jul 04, 2010 Esteban del Mal rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, meet-ze-monsta, when-the-world-was-new, magic-beans, science

I call bullshit.

*****

"How Esteban Got His Groove Back"

Channel surfing the other day, I came across Highlander. I’d never watched the movie all the way through, even as a fanboy teenager those twenty four years ago (!) when it was released, and, noticing that Christopher Lambert bears a striking resemblance to the guy in HBO’s Hung -- a serialized comedy-drama about a male prostitute with an enormous dick for which my wife has an altogether unsettling appetite, having on more than one occasion bl...more

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Jul 04, 2010 Richard marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Recommended to Richard by: NY Times article "Texts Without Context"

Shelves: non-fiction

(Even more late breaking updates, below. Still haven't read it yet, though.)

This book is mentioned in the thoughtful-if-long New York Times Magazine article Texts Without Context , which explores how technology is altering the way we absorb ideas, especially the written word, and how that change in subjectivity is setting us up for subtle but radical shifts in everything from political discourse to the rights of authors.

With respect to this book itself, I'm skeptical.

That we will change as the W...more

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Nov 14, 2010 Ancient rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: essays, pop-non-fiction

I was introduced to the internets for the first time ever when I was 18 and entered college. Up until that time, I had been an avid reader my entire life, and I could easily get lost in a book for several hours at a time. It's been over ten years now since that first introduction. My internet usage is heavier now than it was back then, and I find it much harder to concentrate on solid paragraphs of the written word the way I used to, especially when it comes to fiction.

Regardless of any partic...more I was introduced to the internets for the first time ever when I was 18 and entered college. Up until that time, I had been an avid reader my entire life, and I could easily get lost in a book for several hours at a time. It's been over ten years now since that first introduction. My internet usage is heavier now than it was back then, and I find it much harder to concentrate on solid paragraphs of the written word the way I used to, especially when it comes to fiction.

Regardless of any particulars people might take issue with in Carr's book, I think there is something to the larger point he's trying to make. It is very possible that technology like the internets is going to undermine the written word as we have known it for the last 500 or so years since Gutenberg. I don't think that's an exaggeration, mainly because I myself am experiencing the effects first hand.

It's the brave new, cyberpunk world. Internets type tech is not slowing down in it's spread to engulf the entirety of our lives. It used to be that computers, phones, TV, etc. were confined to the rooms where the bulky equipment necessary could be housed. Now with digital tech everything is portable, therefore these devices and their influence are everywhere all the time.

If Carr is right when he talks about the written word's role in having created a culture of depth over the last several hundred years, I think he also might be right about the internets destroying that culture of depth and replacing it with a culture of superficial data collection, a culture where bulk quantity of info takes precedence over quality and meaningfulness of thought.

Those of us alive at present may yet live to see the day when book reading becomes a forgotten pastime enjoyed by a small group of aficionados the way classical music enjoyment has shrunk down to a niche community fanbase. Yes, people have been saying this for years, but the internets might be the thing that finally does the job. When libraries, the old vanguard of book culture, are getting rid of their books in favor of putting in even more computer terminals (such as is the case at my local library), and even die-hard readers like me sometimes feel too brain-scrambled to stick it out with the written word, what does that tell you?

Let's hope I'm wrong and this is not the beginning of the end of the written word... (less)

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Jun 07, 2011 Mark Desrosiers rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: collapse, inventions, language, psycho-sociology

Beware: when you hit the last page of this fascinating, bleak, helpless narrative -- one that addresses your own brain as a stunted, wasting bundle of unmotivated neurons -- you'll either want to retreat to a shared scholarly past, pointing at physical pages with a yad, or you'll just embrace the terrifying idiocracy-pastebin Second Dark Age that's sweeping over us. Hell, the author himself interrupts his argument on occasion to underscore his own troubles with concentration, even devoting a cha...more Beware: when you hit the last page of this fascinating, bleak, helpless narrative -- one that addresses your own brain as a stunted, wasting bundle of unmotivated neurons -- you'll either want to retreat to a shared scholarly past, pointing at physical pages with a yad, or you'll just embrace the terrifying idiocracy-pastebin Second Dark Age that's sweeping over us. Hell, the author himself interrupts his argument on occasion to underscore his own troubles with concentration, even devoting a chapter to how he managed to finish writing this book.

But there are bright spots -- his concise history of reading (of silent reading) will hustle your brainstem and reinstate for you the one most awesome thing we take for granted. Similarly, later in the narrative he kinda bashes Google as one of the most sinister organizations ever with their 300-year plan to become a corporate repository of all information everywhere. But of course, "information" just means "data" to Google, and thus all books will be churned into a blender of searchable text: "The great library that Google is rushing to create shouldn't be confused with the libraries we've known up until now. It's not a library of books. It's a library of snippets." Love the bashing, but as with everything in this book, Google's book-scanning enterprise seems inevitable, unstoppable.

Which is why things are so bleak -- nowhere does Carr offer a suggestion that maybe this downward trajectory could reverse itself, that perhaps the "reading class" will become admired and emulated, turning people away from their Blackberries and Kindles, and back into the cracked spine of a physical book. And he really doesn't address the scarier fact: what are the brains of the new generation? He's largely writing to his peer cohorts -- those of us whose lives began analog and turned digital -- telling us sad, sympathetic tales of how we don't remember facts or quotes, how we can no longer devote deep attention to a book, how we're constantly distracted and thereby made dumber. But what about the n00bs who are born in 2011 and may never know the pleasure of sitting silently for hours with a sublime, brain-inflaming book? He doesn't go there, because really, he can't... nobody knows what the new brains will do.

Early in his narrative, Carr does bump up against an occasional dialectic -- for example with written literature we lost our magnificent oral culture, but we gained larger stores of memory and logic and a stronger insistence on evidence and facts to guide our daily lives. However, with all we're losing now -- memory, attention, perhaps even the future of literature, poetry, history -- he offers very little in compensation, just some gains in reflexes and hand-eye coordination: lower functions. His own brain is talking back like HAL, and I can hear mine doing it too: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.(less)

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Jun 23, 2011 Newengland rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: finished-in-2011, nonfiction

Here's an inference exercise: Take the first half of Nicholas Carr's title THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS and guess what his thesis is based on the second half. Got it? Good. Cause you "got it good" when it comes to your addiction to the Internet.

Probably you wake up and wonder what's in your e-mail's inbox. Probably you check it before breakfast. Probably, even though you're not supposed to, you peek at it from work. Probably you're part of some social network site like...more Here's an inference exercise: Take the first half of Nicholas Carr's title THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS and guess what his thesis is based on the second half. Got it? Good. Cause you "got it good" when it comes to your addiction to the Internet.

Probably you wake up and wonder what's in your e-mail's inbox. Probably you check it before breakfast. Probably, even though you're not supposed to, you peek at it from work. Probably you're part of some social network site like Facebook or Goodreads and feel you are a "player," a "valued member," a "person to be missed" if you go missing for a week (no worry there!), so you log on and interact. Probably you're pretty witty, too. You can tell because lots of your "friends" (whom you haven't met) ROTFL and LOL at your witticisms. Yes, you take time to eat, but probably you're wondering how your last witticism, or your last thread started, or your last photo uploaded, has gone over. You wonder, for instance, how many "likes" it has garnered or maybe how many "hits" your page has taken or maybe how many "friendquests" you have accumulated (popularity... if it doesn't work in THAT world, certainly seems to in THIS one).

This is important stuff. Thus, the time suck and your total acceptance of that inhaling sound. Probably you could be reading but it's more fun to talk about your reading, or your not reading, or your should-be reading, or the concept of reading. Probably you should be with your family, but what the hell, they're IM-ing or texting or chatting on the cellphone or cruising the Net, too. Send them an e-mail in the other room.

Boy, this is sad. But not really, because the Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away. You, being no fool, focus on the "giveth." The Internet is a world of wonders, a vault of information and facts easily accessible in lightning-like fashion. And you're pretty good at it by now, too, so all is not lost.

So why wade THE SHALLOWS? Why let Carr rain on your parade with his own facts, his own list of studies showing that the Internet is not the be-all after all, but might well be the end-all? Why heed his relentless proofs that the Internet is little more than the Great Interrupter, that the Internet fractures our focus and muddies our mindsets, that hyperlinks distract more than enhance as we research electronically vs. in an old-fashioned book? Why pay attention when you know you're not very good at it any more because the Net has taught your mind to lose focus quickly if it isn't fed quickly? Sound? Bite, please. Sight? Blink, please. Gratification? Instant, please.

Worship at the "Church of Google" (as Carr calls it)? Prepare for some blasphemy. Carr will show you who Google's really looking after (hint: it starts with a "G").

There's a little history here, a lot of studies here, more than a few surveys, statistics, and data here, but Carr pretty much keeps it in layman's terms. He doesn't think the backlash against the Net will necessarily come from Middle-Aged Grouches like me, either. In fact, he suspects it will be the hopeful, counter-revolutionary young who will sound the clarion call for moderation and modesty when it comes to our electronic lives (also known as our kidnapped real-world lives... the "late, great" one, you might recall, that had a dream of SOME sort when you were young... a dream now cannibalized by that doppelganger in the mirror -- OK, screen reflection -- "Virtual You").

Well, you could read it, shrug, and ignore it. You could read it, frown, and dismiss it. Or you could give it some thought, roll up your sleeves, and set to work on the recovery of YOU -- a person you might remember. A person who once knew life without a cellphone, without an Internet, without an iAnything, and was perfectly happy and complete despite that impossible to fathom handicap.

Surely you remember that rather quaint, idealistic person. Right?

Whatever. Before taking the long and winding road back, might as well check e-mail one more time -- just once. Like the White Rabbit, people are waiting and they don't have all day. Not anymore....

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Oct 29, 2010 Carol rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: librarians, teachers, Internet surfers - everybody!

I don't give 5 stars lightly, but this book was absolutely fascinating - to me, at least. Though, as I read passages, I kept thinking of yet another person who ought to read it. Carr (and the book) have been getting a lot of "air play" lately - blogs, NPR, etc., and chapters and snippets of the book have appeared several places (the snippet-ization being another result of the internet that he discusses). Lots of readable, distilled scientific info about current thinking on how the brain works (a...more

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Apr 22, 2011 John Martindale rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Everyone

Recommended to John by: Audible

Shelves: pop-neuroscience, favorites, hope-to-re-read, audiobook

This book was extremely interesting, lots of history, studies and observations and some personal honesty mixed in. I thought it fascinating. He has brought to my mind some interesting and disturbing reflections.

One primary drive of humans is to make life easier. We can't help but want to produce more with less effort, so this has resulted in inventions such as the tractor which plow in one day what it once took a month to accomplish by hand. We likewise seem to have a drive to create devices to...more This book was extremely interesting, lots of history, studies and observations and some personal honesty mixed in. I thought it fascinating. He has brought to my mind some interesting and disturbing reflections.

One primary drive of humans is to make life easier. We can't help but want to produce more with less effort, so this has resulted in inventions such as the tractor which plow in one day what it once took a month to accomplish by hand. We likewise seem to have a drive to create devices to make mental life easier. We no longer need to remember phone numbers, times and dates, for they're in our phones. why needlessly fill our brain with mathematics when our calculator can do the work for us? Our computer faithful reminds us how to spell words and we no longer need look at maps and remember how to get around, because we have the GPS. Why memorize anything anymore for we can google it in a moment on our iphone. Its as if mentally we've thought walking to much effort, so we've made machines to walk for us. This seems fine and dandy, until we learn our legs have withered and have lost strength. Have you ever watched the movie Wall-E? Remember the people on the space ship, hovering around on full-time entertainment machines? It almost seems that this is where technology is leading us!

Now here is the problem, if kids had the choice, most would choose the cushy life; To be physically attractive and rich, to have parents that let them have their way and who spoil them with every toy, electronic and gadget. Yet this is a recipe for the making of a shallow, miserable and wretched individual with no character or integrity. But most of us would choose this as a kid if we could have. The easy feel good way has a strong pull. Fortunately we don't have that option as children and as we've grown up, we've learned that muscles must be strained to grow. Even though we may hate the fact, difficulty, struggle and hard work develops depth and character.

But Technology is offering our adult brains a choice, we can spoil it and let a computer do all the work for us or we can do things the hard way.

It is interesting how our tools become part of us, when we take a hammer, it is to our brain as if its an extension of the hand and it will be able to accomplish what our physical hand could not do, yet it has limitation. Just as binoculars help us see far away but limit our peripheral vision and blind to what is right in front of us. Likewise, our computers will help us to do a lot we could not do otherwise, but it will also have a negative limiting effect.

We program our computers only to find they're programing us. The internet is not only addicting, but it is distraction machine; with links, new messages and ads everywhere, encouraging us to hop from one thing to another thing. Because we spend so much time on it, its wiring our brain to have a short attention span, it may be a big factor in the rise attention deficit disorders. As it becomes more apart of our lives, it becoming harder to focus, think deeply, read a book and harder to remember things.

Yet as the author acknowledges, he is addicted, and I must say I am too, we have grown dependent upon our external brain and could not imagine living without it. It is just to helpful. But as with the writer, all this does cause me to want to limit my time in front of a screen and to force myself to do more actual reading. Disciplining myself to think deeply and make memorization an activity that I partake in again. For I will either use it or loose it.(less)

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Jun 18, 2010 Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: cultural-studies-and-social-critics, science

Nicholas Carr's The Shallows is a book worthy of our attention. His important questions about the ubiquity of Internet use (How is the way we read changing? How is the way we write changing? How is the way we think changing?) deserve our reflection, and even if you disagree with Carr's conclusions (Is Carr a Luddite alarmist?) his thesis will give you much to mull over.

Carr's book is a welcome addition to the current dialogue about how technology shapes our lives--for better and for worse. (An...more

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Apr 05, 2011 Kate Savage rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, techology

Our brains have a plasticity that is easily exploited by the rapid nature of using the internet. In fact, our brains are changing to be able to multitask but not focus in-depth on a particular thing or idea. Carr takes a wide look at this, pulling everywhere from Nietzsche, neuroscience, Google, to Dr. David Levy (one of my favorite profs)and a litany of studies. To some this change in brain wiring is fine. To others, this is not okay. Several studies Carr sites distinctly show how counterproduc...more

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Feb 19, 2013 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bookclub, narrativenonfiction

I'm not sure how I feel about this book, so I'll give it a generic "liked it" three-stars. I like the discussion behind the book and the research. It was thought provoking and interesting. I feel like it encouraged me to think about how much time I spend in front of a computer (think more than I already do) and how I interact with technology. I will also probably do some work on my memory (changing my regular April read-a-poem-a-day challenge to a memorize poetry challenge).

However, all of that...more

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Nov 26, 2012 Scott rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book was by far the most lucid, careful, and convincing analysis of the effect the internet has on our brains that I have read. Sometimes anecdotal, but more often backed by serious neuroscience research, it is clear that the internet is very bad for humanity. Forays into literature, the history of the written word, neuroscientific research, the the meaning and purpose of what has become for many the most important "thing" in their lives - the internet - make this book thoughtful and worthy...more This book was by far the most lucid, careful, and convincing analysis of the effect the internet has on our brains that I have read. Sometimes anecdotal, but more often backed by serious neuroscience research, it is clear that the internet is very bad for humanity. Forays into literature, the history of the written word, neuroscientific research, the the meaning and purpose of what has become for many the most important "thing" in their lives - the internet - make this book thoughtful and worthy of reflection. One must grok its fullness without music playing and sit in a comfortable place with no distractions, because my instinct was to read it in one sitting (I settled for three or four sittings).

I say that the internet is bad for humanity as someone who created and maintains a website for my job (for my students' homework assignments and other resources), and as a teacher of a Global Studies course where each of my students wields an iPad, but I am scared that the "deep reading" of careful study and attentiveness to learning is what makes us smart, capable, sympathetic, logical, and rational human being is being lost with our digital revolution. Our brains were not meant to dash about to satisfy every whim, they were meant to construct cathedrals - to borrow a quote from the latter half of this book - of our minds. We weren't meant to outsource knowledge or thinking, we were meant to do it in our own heads. That is what makes us individuals, and that has worth. Finding quiet within ourselves is part of the quest of learning, and the internet fosters disquiet.

The effects the internet has on our brains is not well understood, but what is clear from this book is that everything scientists have discovered reflects a reliance on our working memory in ways that it clearly is not capable of handling. Distractions abound on the Net, and it is insidious how it does this. Of course it is possible to think deeply on the Net, but studies have shown that people just don't, by and large, and Carr describes clearly how it happens. Knowledge is great and wonderful, but part of the price of having knowledge instantly accessible, this book argues, is that you can know or possess very little of it after a few milliseconds of attention. That's not just the argument of this book, it's scientific fact, and it is a faustian bargain if there ever was one. The way we create lasting knowledge in our brains (memories) is by careful appraisal of things we care about and want to learn more about, not by hastily accessing a morsel of knowledge on the web whenever we happen to think of it.

A corollary to this study of the effect the Net is having on our brains is that we are falling into the trap of having our technology dictate our behavior, rather than having technology enable our behavior. This is not new - the Industrial Revolution, the Neolithic Revolution, and a multitude of inventions that humans rely on and have for centuries is clear testament to that - but no preceding technology has the current effect of modifying our behavior to make us dumber and more reliant external sources (ie not-our-brains) for our thinking output. Moreover, these external sources simply do not think, have memories, or have the capacity to encode the rich melody of human experience in ways that the we do. In the spirit of creating a global community of learners that can easily access the whole of human knowledge, this technology is more and more geared towards making thinking easier, which brings about exactly the opposite of its intended goal.

The medium is the message, McLuhan once wrote, and this medium's message is constructed by corporations that want our brain to not work so hard to remember things - the silly thing is that the more our brains practice storing things in long-term memory, the more inimitable, boundless, and astoundingly purposeful it is. Do we want corporate entities like Google determining how best to use our brains and allow our best repository of knowledge there ever has been - books - and its best search engine - our brains - go by the wayside?

Unless we all want to turn out like Derek Zoolander, we'd all be better off reading this book. Read, in fact, any book without distractions.(less)

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Aug 17, 2010 Will Byrnes rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, public-health, psychology-and-the-brain, brain-candy

In this fascinating, informative book, Carr argues that the internet has not only affected how society communicates and works, but that how our actual brains work is being, has been changed by contemporary modes of communication. He delves into the history of research into brain function to make a case that similar biological changes occurred with prior technological breakthroughs, such as the typewriter. He cites a wealth of studies that dispel the notion of the brain as set in stone once adult...more In this fascinating, informative book, Carr argues that the internet has not only affected how society communicates and works, but that how our actual brains work is being, has been changed by contemporary modes of communication. He delves into the history of research into brain function to make a case that similar biological changes occurred with prior technological breakthroughs, such as the typewriter. He cites a wealth of studies that dispel the notion of the brain as set in stone once adulthood is reached. The brain is plastic. All our neural circuitry can be modified, and it adapts to each new technology, not with slow genetic modification, but using inherent neurological plasticity to function in new ways.

Next he follows the trail of language from cuneiform through wax tablets to papyrus, and actual pages, from Gutenberg to today, from the radio to television, from Turing to the iPhone. It is a fast-paced and information-rich journey.

The big guns come out in chapter 7, The Juggler’s Brain, where Carr argues forcefully that the medium of the internet is, by design, an engine of distraction, and it has changed how we read and how we think. The change may have some benefits, but the cost is quite high, particularly in reducing our ability to think reflectively. I found this chapter particularly compelling.

A later chapter reports on Google’s megalomaniacal plan to put all books in human history into a single database that Google will control. All that’s lacking is a smug, pinkie-ringed fat guy sitting in his secret lair stroking a fluffy white cat.

Chapter nine takes on the mechanistic view of the human brain as a sort of computer. In particular Carr takes issue with the view of long-term memory as being the equivalent of a hard drive, used solely to hold information. It turns out that, unlike the on-off character of digital memory, human memory is not so absolute. Information, observation and experience go through several steps before finding their way to long term memory, and even when a memory or bit of information is recalled, it finds its way back into long-term memory with the added color and texture of the time and circumstances of its recollection. This is fascinating stuff, but I think he goes a bit too far in his dismissal of the computer as a model for human brainworks. Consider that he fully embraces a concept of “working memory” as a temporary workplace in which new memory is mixed with retrieved memory to constitute the bulk of what we consider active consciousness. The similarity to RAM is just too obvious to ignore.

Quibble aside, this is a riveting and informative tale, with obvious implications for our culture, that is, if you can pay attention to reading it long enough for the lessons to sink in.

Some quotes:

P 6
As McLuhan suggested, media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my [Carr’s:] capacity for concentration and contemplation.

P 115 – As revolutionary as it may be, the Net is best understood as the latest in a long series of tools that have helped mold the human mind.

P 140 – Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively. “Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no,” says Grafman. “The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.” You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.(less)

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Nov 27, 2012 Nicholas rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Really enjoyed chapters 1-4. Now that I'm in the midst of chapter 5, I'm getting angry. Carr has founded his argument on solid research and good science. Suddenly he's masking value judgments as scientific fact and assuming his favored kinds of reading are the only kinds of intellectual activity. More accurately, he treats scholars who are looking for new ways of reading as people who have abandoned reading.

This is very disappointing, since the book started so strongly. Carr needs more than nost...more

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Sep 16, 2010 Paula rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, best-reads-of-2010

Since Carr's thesis seemed self-evident to me, I underestimated how much I'd enjoy reading his book, and how much I'd learn from doing so. Blame it on the neuroscience, which Carr elucidates extensively, and on his historical recapitulation of the impact on the human brain and culture of earlier technologies. Since clocks, maps, alphabets, number systems & books have been givens for the entirety of my life, I've given little thought to life without them. Any consideration that I have given t...more Since Carr's thesis seemed self-evident to me, I underestimated how much I'd enjoy reading his book, and how much I'd learn from doing so. Blame it on the neuroscience, which Carr elucidates extensively, and on his historical recapitulation of the impact on the human brain and culture of earlier technologies. Since clocks, maps, alphabets, number systems & books have been givens for the entirety of my life, I've given little thought to life without them. Any consideration that I have given to such intellectual technologies has been in terms of how they affect me personally, for example, several years ago, I decided to stop wearing a wristwatch in an attempt to free myself from constantly attending to what time it is(mostly a failed attempt, since now I wear a pedometer with a clock function). Until reading The Shallows I hadn't considered how the advent of timekeeping mechanisms changed the physiology of the human brain itself. Flash forward some centuries to now and the new intellectual technology on the block, rewiring our brains and rewriting culture, is the Internet. I might quibble with Carr's unequivocally negative assessment of the effects of "distraction," "interruption," and "loss of closure" as well as with his perhaps overvaluation of "linear narrative" and "deep thinking." Linear exposition that allows one to follow a complex argument or presentation of information is ideal if one's need or desire is to learn "facts," but fiction and poetry often work quite differently. Non-linear narrative and openendedness as literary strategies are nothing new. For example, Denis Diderot's 18th century novel Jacques le fataliste et son maitre, itself a tribute to Sterne's Tristram Shandy, includes around 60 characters, 21 stories and 180 breaks in the narrative.That said, Carr's arguments are compelling. I particularly took note of his claim that we are distracted by hypertext links even if we don't click on them, because they prompt the brain to shift from reading mode to decision-making mode. The scariest chapter in The Shallows is undoubtedly the one entitled "The Church of Google." Carr notes that "Google's profits are tied directly to the velocity of people's information intake" and that "every click we make on the Web marks a break in our concentration, a bottom-up disruption of our attention--and it's in Google's economic interest to make sure we click as often as possible." For the engineers at Google, "ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed." In the face of such engineers' desire "to create an amazingly cool machine that will be able to outthink its creators," perhaps we can take comfort in Carr's reminder that "biological memory is alive; computer memory is not" and his quoting of Torkel Klingberg's assertion that "the brain cannot be full."

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Sep 27, 2010 Natali rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have been trying to put a finger on how the technology of our age has changed my thought process. Nicholas Carr hits the nail on the head with The Shallows. He proposes that our attraction to fast news, short interaction, and distracting communication tools is changing our brains and making us intolerant of long-form reading and synthesis. He says that something called neuroplasticity trains our brains to evolve based on external stimuli. So with today's digital medium, we are leaving behind c...more

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Feb 02, 2013 Mike Clinton rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Mike by: Carol Breslin

Carr anaylzes, synthesizes, and reflects upon a substantial range of research that covers many inter-related topics. He makes a compelling argument that left me with an image of the human brain as an ecological system that can be deeply affected by changes that seem innocuous or even beneficent on a superficial level. According to Carr, the tools that we use - in this case, the Internet and other digital media - affect not only our habits of thinking but also the physical arrangements in our bra...more

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Jun 05, 2012 Joy added it · review of another edition

"We need to work in Google's 'world of numbers,' but we also need to be able to retreat to Sleepy Hollow. The problem today is that we're losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we're in perpetual locomotion." ~ pg. 168

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Apr 12, 2012 Sydney Young rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bookclub-selections, read-because-i-thought-i-should, must-read-in-your-lifetime, 2012-favorites

Very interesting book, which addressed concerns I have had about wading in the shallows (the net and it's small bits). But somehow this book is reassuring to me. Even if you notice that you are addicted to the shallows, it doesn't have to define you or encompass you. Force down time, read a book, get outside, (and I add, listen to music), and your deep thinking will hum with pleasure.

According to Carr and the research he cites, deep thinking makes us smarter, better at what we are doing, and mor...more

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Mar 09, 2013 Keith Bordeaux rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was a fascinating book. One that I'll be thinking about for a long time. I found myself identifying with the symptoms of Juggler's Brain and chronic distractedness. Maybe you will too. The book has made me want to change some of my habits in regards to my "connected" life. To take a walk in the woods or read more books instead of letting technology dictate where my attention goes.

This was a great book to kick off my new goal of reading 30 books this year. Time to shut down the web browser a...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Jon added it

Very useful discussion, with lots of fascinating historical detail, about how the brain works and how the Internet may impair its functioning. However, while analyzing different paradigms humans have used throughout history--largely based on then-current technology--Carr himself falls victim to our current paradigm when he declares that books must be digitized. Why? So some family in Zimbabwe that doesn't have electricity and can't read (English, anyway) can check out A. E. Housman? How disappoi...more

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May 18, 2013 Victoria Haf rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Must read para todos los que lean este review porque están haciéndolo a través de una computadora. Nicholas G.Carr nos explica como no sólo somos nosotros a modificar al mundo con nuestras herremientas sino nuestras herramientas a modificarnos, se enfoca obviamente sobre el internet pero lo contextualiza muy bien, usando sobre todo analogías con la creación de la escritura y los cambios que ello trajo (yo ya había leído Oralidad y Escritura de Walter Ong que me resultó también muy interesante y...more

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May 05, 2013 Ben Thurley rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In a nutshell, according to Carr, the internet is increasing your focus on short-term thinking, scanning and decision-making, at the expense of deeper and more sustained attention and thought. This books stems from his own struggle with deep, focused reading and capacity to avoid interruption and to follow and develop arguments, and his feeling that the Net had been "chipping away" his "capacity for concentration and contemplation."

He notes that, like all technologies –and he discusses clocks, m...more In a nutshell, according to Carr, the internet is increasing your focus on short-term thinking, scanning and decision-making, at the expense of deeper and more sustained attention and thought. This books stems from his own struggle with deep, focused reading and capacity to avoid interruption and to follow and develop arguments, and his feeling that the Net had been "chipping away" his "capacity for concentration and contemplation."

He notes that, like all technologies – and he discusses clocks, maps and typewriters, as well as literacy and all the wonders of the computer age – the Web is changing who we are, how we relate and how we think. The incessant searching for links, for diversion, widgets, popups, push notifications and the like all add up to what Cory Doctorow calls an "ecosystem of interruption technologies."

The internet is, also, as a matter of simple economics, displacing a large portion of traditional print media, and the businesses that have been built around them. Although Carr, apart from some desultory analysis of Google and Amazon, doesn't talk that much about this. His focus is far more on the personal impact of net usage.

He builds his argument on research into the plasticity of the brain – the way it is able to form new synaptic connections, reroute old ones, and strengthen connections with repeated stimuli and rewards.

One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental cicuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. It’s not just that we tend to use the Net regularly, even obsessively. It’s that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli – repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive – that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.

Which seems self-evident. It's clear, as well, that Carr is not particularly sanguine about the personal and social impacts of these rapid changes – he even quotes the prophet Isaiah about the fashioning of idols to critique the internet.

Along the way he offers an informative history of the development of literacy. But there are a couple of digressions (on artificial intelligence, particularly) that seemed pretty tangential to the topic and could probably have been helpfully left out.

Still if you've read this far into the review, you really should take a break from the web. Buy a puppy. Go for more bushwalks. Volunteer somewhere far away from wireless broadband. Read a book. One printed on actual dead trees.
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May 03, 2013 Lois rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The author makes his case very well, using neurobiological research to back up what Marshall McLuhan intuited back in the 1960s. The media that a society uses shapes its participants, even to the extent of reshaping the wiring of their brains. Looking at a 17th-century text compared to one today, there is little doubt that the attention span of the average reader must have dropped significantly. Or compare the Lincoln/Douglas debates to today's talking-head soundbites.

But if easy, ready access...more

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Apr 23, 2013 Mark Taylor rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I really enjoyed this book. I found the mixture of history, science and generous quotations from other scientific and literary works compelling and an extremely interesting read.

While there were a lot of links to Marshall McLuhan's classic thoughts from the 60s around the "medium is the message" this book takes that thought much further. And it goes without saying that this is a far less dense and complex work than McLuhan's.

I got this book because I was worried about the web's effect on how I w...more I really enjoyed this book. I found the mixture of history, science and generous quotations from other scientific and literary works compelling and an extremely interesting read.

While there were a lot of links to Marshall McLuhan's classic thoughts from the 60s around the "medium is the message" this book takes that thought much further. And it goes without saying that this is a far less dense and complex work than McLuhan's.

I got this book because I was worried about the web's effect on how I work and think. The unfortunate thing is that the arguments in the book now strengthen that belief. The good news is that a deeper understand of the how and why enables me to do something about it.

If you have children at school or about to go to University I would urge you to encourage them to read this book. While the very arguments in the book will make the act of reading hard for teenagers it could very well change the way they operate as they continue to try and learn. And maybe it will provide them an advantage over their peers. If you talk to teenagers about the downsides of multitasking and constant distractions they will say that it isn't a problem for them. That they have grown up with this method of acquiring information and communicating and so benefit from it. In one sense they are right. They can multitask and they can quickly scan information for nuggets of data they are seeking. But their ability to learn deeply, their ability to remember information in a way that enables them to build that depth and then cross link things for sparks of intuition is harmed.

Being able to undertake deep reading without being distracted but then also immersing yourself in the hyper connected world probably gives people the most benefit as they learn. But do those things at different times. A concentrated, non-distracted, deep learning time should be completely separate from a session of hyper-connectedness.

And therein lies my rationale for 4 stars instead of 5. The book just seems to end. Sure it's set up the reader to go away and reflect on what's been written. And that certainly is no bad thing. I would just liked to have seen a final summation chapter (not just the post writing anecdotes) that either made the points I just made above or at least gave the authour's view of how behavioural changes or different approaches to the hyper-connected world might benefit us more. In fact it felt from the author's finishing comments that despite cutting himself off in the mountains of Colorado to write the book he himself was slipping back into the hyper connected word of distraction and information overload. (Nice to see he lives in Boulder though!)(less)

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Apr 22, 2013 Tim Johnson rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Carr's work is interesting and thought provoking. I would caution readers against taking everything he writes at face value. I don't believe that his basic premise, that greater media use, is giving everyone a form of information ADHD is applicable to me personally. But there could certainly be a great number of information consumers that do experience such symptoms. Librarians, or anyone acting as an information broker, have a real chance at helping users evaluate the information they take in a...more

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Apr 11, 2013 Constantine rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As a musician and recording studio engineer, I've been attuned to the analogue versus digital debate that rages (raged?) in those realms for years. In a rather serendipitous turn of events I just happened to finish Carr's book,The Shallows, about an hour before watching a documentary on the legendary recording studio Studio City (by David Grohl. There are aome fascinating parallels. To qoute Carr, "The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on indeterminate, organic growth are,...more As a musician and recording studio engineer, I've been attuned to the analogue versus digital debate that rages (raged?) in those realms for years. In a rather serendipitous turn of events I just happened to finish Carr's book,The Shallows, about an hour before watching a documentary on the legendary recording studio Studio City (by David Grohl. There are aome fascinating parallels. To qoute Carr, "The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on indeterminate, organic growth are, it turns out, remarkably apt, ...Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electric, and genetic, every aspect of human memory---the way it's formed,maintained, connected, recalled,--has almost infinite gradations.Computer memory exists as simple binary bits--ones and zeroes--that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be open or closed but nothing in between"(pp191-192). Here, Carr is explicating his viewpoint that human memory is fundamentally different (and therefore superior in specific ways)to the digitalized memory of computers. Carr is right in linking this to the unpredicatable, ever changing, "contigency" of the feedback loop between memory and thinking in humans (analogue/organic beings). For me, this is clearly analgous to the same basic debate in musical spheres beween the proponents of digital "static" (ones and zeroes) music as created by samplers, sequencers, and Pro Tools type recorders that simply cannot and do not allow for the irratic, contigent, anomolies of tape and tube, wood and string that oscillate and vibrate with the same aforementioned "infinite gradations" that are, at once, the magical elixer of human imperfection, infinite variation, ....and the source of surprise/delight. Perhaps this is too arcane an area of comparison...if so, I apologize.
Carr's book was a great read (really 41/2 stars!1) and gave me a lot more to think about than the tangental analogy above.I think that anyone that is pondering the paradigm shift that the internet, the computer,the plethora of gadgetry that is, in short, accomplishing at a rapid rate the "digitalization" of our world, our culture, (our minds?) would benefit from a careful reading of this book. It is a well written, researched, cogent, and fascinating book about a very critical subject! All of mankind's technologies are two edged (Nietzsche pointed out that a hammer can be used to build or to destroy) and I think we need to at least consider the potential dangers, to assess (as Carr brilliantly does here) the negative aspects of this brave new world we seem to be rushing blindly towards. There does seem to be a bit of resignation in Carr's final summation. As others have pointed out in their reviews, Carr doesn't really offer any solid suggestions for escaping the onslaught on our books, our brains, and our culture that has brought us to this critical juncture.
Ultimately, this is a book that I intend to reread several times...it merits slow, deliberate, contemplation...of course, that is precisely what Carr suggests we are losing... our ability to do read and think. !!!!!! Hey...I'm a die-hard and I'll go down swinging!(less)

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Apr 08, 2013 Tam Nguyen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, favorite

Chúng ta thường không biết rằng Internet đã tác động tới hành vi và cách tư duy của ta như thế nào. Đôi khi chúng ta đã quá ảnh hưởng vào các phương tiện truyền thông, những trang mạng xã hội và bộ óc của chúng ta đã bị lấn át bởi các lợi ích tuyệt vời của nó.

Thích nhất là trong cuốn sách ông thảo luận rất nhiều về việc đọc sách, về sự hình thành và phát triển của giấy, rồi đến sự ra đời của Internet, Amazon rồi Kindle, cuối cùng là sự lợi ích cũng như bất lợi của sách giấy hiện nay. Thực sự là...more

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Apr 06, 2013 Mark Nichols rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An interesting look at the complicated benefits and detriments of technology - particularly, how as we become more scientific as a species, it is often at the cost of becoming more mechanical.

As someone who has worried a lot about the cognitive effects of 'tech addiction' (I find it increasingly difficult to read for sustained periods of time, which I feel causes a certain atrophy to occur in my brain/memory), it's very sobering to hear that the knowledge outboarding we've been participating in...more

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Apr 05, 2013 Arjun Ravichandran rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An expansion of an earlier article he wrote, the author argues that the internet is not simply a technology that we use to add to our lives ; but rather, it is in danger of becoming our lives. The way in which the gap between human beings and the Internet is slowly becoming erased is to be seen in the effects that such a ubiquitous technology has on our brains ; the book's title derives from the lack of depth that characterizes the modern mind. Among the symptoms of this is the inability to conc...more

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About Nicholas G. Carr

Nicholas Carr (born in 1959) is the author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google (W.W. Norton, 2008) and of Does IT Matter? (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). The former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, he has written articles for the New York Times, the Financial Times, Wired, The Guardian, and many other publications. His popular blog, Rough Type, can b...more

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Books by Nicholas G. Carr

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

Does It Matter?: Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage

Managing Difficult People (Harvard Business Review Case Studies)

Il lato oscuro della Rete. Libertà, sicurezza, privacy

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