The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

Our intellectual maturation as individuals can be traced through the way we draw pictures, or maps, of our surroundings.

We progress from the infant’s egocentric, purely sensory perception of the world to the young adult’s more abstract and objective analysis of experience.

The historical advances in cartography didn’t simply mirror the development of the human mind. They helped propel and guide the very intellectual advances that they documented. The map is a medium that not only stores and transmits information but also embodies a particular mode of seeing and thinking.

The technology of the map gave to man a new and more comprehending mind, better able to understand the unseen forces that shape his surroundings and his existence.

Spurred by the need for temporal exactitude, monks took the lead in pushing forward the technologies of timekeeping. It was in the monastery that the first mechanical clocks were assembled, their movements governed by the swinging of weights, and it was the bells in the church tower that first sounded the hours by which people would come to parcel out their lives.

The personal clock became, as Landes writes, “an ever-visible, ever-audible companion and monitor.” By continually reminding its owner of “time used, time spent, time wasted, time lost,” it became both “prod and key to personal achievement and productivity.”

The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement.

Independent of the practical concerns that inspired the timekeeping machine’s creation and governed its day-to-day use, the clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man.

EVERY TECHNOLOGY IS an expression of human will. Through our tools, we seek to expand our power and control over our circumstances—over nature, over time and distance, over one another.

Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.

The intellectual ethic of a technology is rarely recognized by its inventors. They are usually so intent on solving a particular problem or untangling some thorny scientific or engineering dilemma that they don’t see the broader implications of their work.

The intellectual ethic is the message that a medium or other tool transmits into the minds and culture of its users.

Some have made the case for what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen dubbed “technological determinism”; they’ve argued that technological progress, which they see as an autonomous force outside man’s control, has been the primary factor influencing the course of human history.

At the other end of the spectrum are the instrumentalists—the people who, like David Sarnoff, downplay the power of technology, believing tools to be neutral artifacts, entirely subservient to the conscious wishes of their users.

Instrumentalism is the most widely held view of technology, not least because it’s the view we would prefer to be true.

If you look at a particular technology at a particular point in time, it certainly appears that, as the instrumentalists claim, our tools are firmly under our control. Every day, each of us makes conscious decisions about which tools we use and how we use them.

But if you take a broader historical or social view, the claims of the determinists gain credibility. Although individuals and communities may make very different decisions about which tools they use, that doesn’t mean that as a species we’ve had much control over the path or pace of technological progress.

Though we’re rarely conscious of the fact, many of the routines of our lives follow paths laid down by technologies that came into use long before we were born.

But there is one thing that determinists and instrumentalists can agree on: technological advances often mark turning points in history.

The circuitry devoted to maintaining representations of space likely shrank, while areas employed in deciphering complex and abstract visual information likely expanded or strengthened.

We began to “map” our lives, our social spheres, even our ideas. Under the sway of the mechanical clock, people began thinking of their brains and their bodies—of the entire universe, in fact—as operating “like clockwork.”

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.

Language itself is not a technology. It’s native to our species. Our brains and bodies have evolved to speak and to hear words.

Because reading and writing have become so central to our identity and culture, it’s easy to assume that they, too, are innate talents. But they’re not.

Our minds have to be taught how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. Reading and writing require schooling and practice, the deliberate shaping of the brain.

Experiments have revealed that the brains of the literate differ from the brains of the illiterate in many ways—not only in how they understand language but in how they process visual signals, how they reason, and how they form memories.

Brain scans have also revealed that people whose written language uses logographic symbols, like the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is considerably different from the circuitry found in people whose written language employs a phonetic alphabet.

Because the cuneiform and hieroglyphic systems incorporated many logosyllabic characters, denoting not just things but also speech sounds, they placed far greater demands on the brain than did the simple accounting tokens.

The Sumerians and the Egyptians had to develop neural circuits that, according to Wolf, literally “crisscrossed” the cortex, linking areas involved not only in seeing and sense-making but in hearing, spatial analysis, and decision making.

The Greeks analyzed all the sounds, or phonemes, used in spoken language, and were able to represent them with just twenty-four characters, making their alphabet a comprehensive and efficient system for writing and reading.

Its arrival marked the start of one of the most far-reaching revolutions in intellectual history: the shift from an oral culture, in which knowledge was exchanged mainly by speaking, to a literary culture, in which writing became the major medium for expressing thought.

Unlike the orator Socrates, Plato was a writer, and while we can assume that he shared Socrates’ worry that reading might substitute for remembering, leading to a loss of inner depth, it’s also clear that he recognized the advantages that the written word had over the spoken one.

Today we think of poetry as being part of literature, a form of writing, but that wasn’t the case in Plato’s time. Declaimed rather than inscribed, listened to rather than read, poetry represented the ancient tradition of oral expression, which remained central to the Greek educational system, as well as the general Greek culture.

Plato saw the great intellectual benefits that the alphabet could bring to civilization—benefits that were already apparent in his own writing.

Diction and syntax became highly rhythmical, tuned to the ear, and information was encoded in common turns of phrase—what we’d today call clichés—to aid memorization. Knowledge was embedded in “poetry,” as Plato defined it, and a specialized class of poet-scholars became the human devices, the flesh-and-blood intellectual technologies, for information storage, retrieval, and transmission.

The written word liberated knowledge from the bounds of individual memory and freed language from the rhythmical and formulaic structures required to support memorization and recitation.

The Sumerians were the first to use a specialized medium for writing. They etched their cuneiform into carefully prepared tablets made of clay, an abundant resource in Mesopotamia.

To accommodate the longer pieces of writing, the Sumerians would often number their tablets, creating a sequence of clay “pages” that anticipated the form of the modern book.

Around 2500 BC, the Egyptians began manufacturing scrolls from the papyrus plants that grew throughout the Nile delta.

Flexible, portable, and easy to store, scrolls offered considerable advantages over the much heavier tablets.

Though not a very sophisticated tool, the wax tablet played a major role in turning writing and reading from specialized, formal crafts into casual, everyday activities—for literate citizens, anyway.

Because a scribe could write on both sides of a codex page, a book required much less papyrus or parchment than did a one-sided scroll, reducing the cost of production substantially. Books were also much more compact, making them easier to transport and to conceal.

Even as the technology of the book sped ahead, the legacy of the oral world continued to shape the way words on pages were written and read.

The new codices, like the tablets and scrolls that preceded them, were almost always read aloud, whether the reader was in a group or alone.

It’s hard for us to imagine today, but no spaces separated the words in early writing.

It would never have crossed the minds of the first writers to put blank spaces between words. They were simply transcribing speech, writing what their ears told them to write.

The scribes didn’t pay much attention to the order of the words in a sentence either. In spoken language, meaning had always been conveyed mainly through inflection, the pattern of stresses a speaker places on syllables, and that oral tradition continued to govern writing.

Sounding out the syllables was crucial to deciphering the writing. Those constraints, which would seem intolerable to us today, didn’t matter much in a culture still rooted in orality.

As the Middle Ages progressed, the number of literate people—cenobites, students, merchants, aristocrats—grew steadily, and the availability of books expanded.

People began to want, and to need, to read quickly and privately. Reading was becoming less an act of performance and more a means of personal instruction and improvement.