The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

THE MAP AND clock changed language indirectly, by suggesting new metaphors to describe natural phenomena. Other intellectual technologies change language more directly, and more deeply, by actually altering the way we speak and listen or read and write. They might enlarge or compress our vocabulary, modify the norms of diction or word order, or encourage either simpler or more complex syntax. Because language is, for human beings, the primary vessel of conscious thought, particularly higher forms of thought, the technologies that restructure language tend to exert the strongest influence over our intellectual lives. As the classical scholar Walter J. Ong put it, “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.”18 The history of language is also a history of the mind.