The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

There’s nothing wrong with browsing and scanning, or even power-browsing and power-scanning. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines in order to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to skim text is every bit as important as the ability to read deeply. What is different, and troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for deeper study, scanning is becoming an end in itself—our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts. We’ve reached the point where a Rhodes Scholar like Florida State’s Joe O’Shea—a philosophy major, no less—is comfortable admitting not only that he doesn’t read books but that he doesn’t see any particular need to read them. Why bother, when you can Google the bits and pieces you need in a fraction of a second? What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.