The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

neuroplasticity: in simple terms, that the things we do have a physical effect on the structure of our brains.

screen technologies are neither evil nor miraculous in their effects on the human mind: rather, for every talent lost or diminished, another will be gained or enhanced. What is certain, however, is that our minds will change.

‘With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use.’”

“If you retain any residual aspirations for literary repartee, prefer the smell of a book to a mouse and, most important, enjoy the quiet meanderings within your own mind that can be triggered by a good bit of prose, you are the person to whom Nicholas Carr has addressed his riveting new book, The Shallows.”

Shallows to give anyone pause about society’s full embrace of the Internet as an unadulterated force for progress.”

In the search for unlimited information and connectivity, we have also provided ourselves with an infinite scope for distraction.”

When it comes to the quality of our thoughts and judgments, the amount of information a communication medium supplies is less important than the way the medium presents the information and the way, in turn, our minds take it in.

The passageway from perception to understanding is narrow. It takes patience and concentration to evaluate new information—to gauge its accuracy, to weigh its relevance and worth, to put it into context—and the Internet, by design, subverts patience and concentration.

When the brain is overloaded by stimuli, as it usually is when we’re peering into a network-connected computer screen, attention splinters, thinking becomes superficial, and memory suff...

dissolution of the linear mind.

“The medium is the message.”

“The electric technology is within the gates,” he wrote, “and we are numb, deaf, blind and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed.”

They care about the news in the newspaper, the music on the radio, the shows on the TV, the words spoken by the person on the far end of the phone line. The technology of the medium, however astonishing it may be, disappears behind whatever flows through it—facts, entertainment, instruction, conversation.

One side’s abundant Eden is the other’s vast wasteland.

in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.

As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it—and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.

alter “patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”3 The

Our focus on a medium’s content can blind us to these deep effects. We’re too busy being dazzled or disturbed by the programming to notice what’s going on inside our heads. In the end, we come to pretend that the technology itself doesn’t matter.

Every new medium, McLuhan understood, changes us.

The content of a medium is just “the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.”

The computer screen bulldozes our doubts with its bounties and conveniences. It is so much our servant that it would seem churlish to notice that it is also our master.

My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore.

The boons are real. But they come at a price.

media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.

“What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”3

“I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,”

His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

should be reading a lot—only I don’t. I skim. I scroll. I have very little patience for long, drawn-out, nuanced arguments, even though I accuse others of painting the world too simply.”

“we can’t yet recognize the superiority of this networked thinking process because we’re measuring it against our old linear thought process.”

For some people, the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even a little silly

“Digital immersion,” wrote the lead researcher, “has even affected the way they absorb information. They don’t necessarily read a page from left to right and from top to bottom. They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest.”

The Net has become essential to their work, school, or social lives, and often to all three.

that for society as a whole the Net has become, in just the twenty years since the software programmer Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web, the communication and information medium of choice.

The scope of its use is unprecedented, even by the standards of the mass media of the twentieth century.

We seem to have arrived, as McLuhan said we would, at an important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of transition between two very different modes of thinking.

What we’re trading away in return for the riches of the Net—and only a curmudgeon would refuse to see the riches—is what Karp calls “our old linear thought process.”

Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, o...

“When I am performing bricolage in real time over the course of hours, I am ‘feeling’ my brain light up, I [am] ‘feeling’ like I’m getting smarter.”

The feelings are intoxicating—so much so that they can distract us from the Net’s deeper cognitive consequences.

Dartmouth had long been a leader in academic computing, playing a pivotal role in making the power of data-processing machines easily available to students and teachers.

The mainframes ran the groundbreaking Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, an early type of network that allowed dozens of people to use the computers simultaneously. Time-sharing was the first manifestation of what we today call personal computing. It made possible, as Kemeny wrote in his book, “a true symbiotic relationship between man and computer.”

There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait years, decades even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from their appointed slots.

The computer, I began to sense, was more than just a simple tool that did what you told it to do. It was a machine that, in subtle but unmistakable ways, exerted an influence over you. The more I used it, the more it altered the way I worked.

trapped, not unhappily, in the “upgrade cycle.”

“By following the links—click, and the linked document appears—you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition.”

You slaved over a manuscript, sent it off to a publisher, and, assuming it wasn’t sent back with a rejection slip, went through rounds of editing, fact checking, and proofreading. The finished product wouldn’t appear until weeks or months later. If it was a book, you might have to wait more than a year to see it in print. Blogging junked the traditional publishing apparatus. You’d type something up, code a few links, hit the Publish button, and your work would be out there, immediately, for all the world to see. You’d also get something you rarely got with more formal writing: direct responses from readers, in the form of comments or, if the readers had their own blogs, links. It felt new and liberating.

the time the print editions arrived, dewdampened or otherwise, I felt like I’d already seen all the stories.

began to notice that the Net was exerting a much stronger and broader influence over me than my old stand-alone PC ever had.

It wasn’t just that I was spending so much time staring into a computer screen. It wasn’t just that so many of my habits and routines were changing as I became more accustomed to and dependent on the sites and services of the Net. The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing.

But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it—and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became.