The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

Research has shown that the cognitive act of reading draws not just on our sense of sight but also on our sense of touch. It’s tactile as well as visual.

The shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it.

Links don’t just point us to related or supplemental works; they propel us toward them. They encourage us to dip in and out of a series of texts rather than devote sustained attention to any one of them.

Searches also lead to the fragmentation of online works. A search engine often draws our attention to a particular snippet of text, a few words or sentences that have strong relevance to whatever we’re searching for at the moment, while providing little incentive for taking in the work as a whole.

By combining many different kinds of information on a single screen, the multimedia Net further fragments content and disrupts our concentration.

As the Net expands, other media contract. By changing the economics of production and distribution, the Net has cut into the profitability of many news, information, and entertainment businesses, particularly those that have traditionally sold physical products.

Many producers are chopping up their products to fit the shorter attention spans of online consumers, as well as to raise their profiles on search engines.

There’s much to be said for what economists call the “unbundling” of content. It provides people with more choices and frees them from unwanted purchases.

Many magazines have tweaked their layouts to mimic or at least echo the look and feel of Web sites. They’ve shortened their articles, introduced capsule summaries, and crowded their pages with easy-to-browse blurbs and captions.

A few magazines, realizing that competing with the Web on its own terms is a losing proposition, have reversed their strategies. They’ve gone back to simpler, less cluttered designs and longer articles.

When we carry a powerful mobile computer into a theater or other venue, we carry, as well, all the communication and social-networking tools available on the Web. It long ago became common for concertgoers to record and broadcast snippets of shows to friends through the cameras in their cell phones.

When a printed book—whether a recently published scholarly history or a two-hundred-year-old Victorian novel—is transferred to an electronic device connected to the Internet, it turns into something very like a Web site.

Its links and other digital enhancements propel the reader hither and yon.

The linearity of the printed book is shattered, along with the calm attentiveness it encourages in the reader.

CHANGES IN READING style will also bring changes in writing style, as authors and their publishers adapt to readers’ new habits and expectations.

By the end of the decade, cell phone novels had come to dominate the country’s best-seller lists. The three top-selling Japanese novels in 2007 were all originally written on mobile phones.

Now that the context of reading is again shifting, from the private page to the communal screen, authors will adapt once more.

As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.

The finality of the act of publishing has long instilled in the best and most conscientious writers and editors a desire, even an anxiety, to perfect the works they produce—to write with an eye and an ear toward eternity.

In the digital marketplace, publication becomes an ongoing process rather than a discrete event, and revision can go on indefinitely.

It seems likely that removing the sense of closure from book writing will, in time, alter writers’ attitudes toward their work. The pressure to achieve perfection will diminish, along with the artistic rigor that the pressure imposed.

A personal letter written in, say, the nineteenth century bears little resemblance to a personal e-mail or text message written today. Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.

The practice of deep reading that became popular in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention, in which “the quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind,” will continue to fade, in all likelihood becoming the province of a small and dwindling elite.

the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the “era of mass [book] reading” was a brief “anomaly” in our intellectual history: “We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.”

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the burgeoning popularity of newspapers—well over a hundred were being published in London alone—led many observers to assume that books were on the verge of obsolescence.

But a new threat to their existence had already emerged: Thomas Edison’s phonograph. It seemed obvious, at least to the intelligentsia, that people would soon be listening to literature rather than reading it.

During the twentieth century, book reading would withstand a fresh onslaught of seemingly mortal threats: moviegoing, radio listening, TV viewing.

Clay Shirky, a digital-media scholar at New York University, suggested in a 2008 blog post that we shouldn’t waste our time mourning the death of deep reading—it was overrated all along.

Indeed, we’ve “been emptily praising” writers like Tolstoy and Proust “all these years.” Our old literary habits “were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access.”

Such proclamations seem a little too staged to take seriously. They come off as the latest manifestation of the outré posturing that has always characterized the anti-intellectual wing of academia.

Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift—to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought.

Multitasking has become so routine that most of us would find it intolerable if we had to go back to computers that could run only one program or open only one file at a time.

In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us. We have cast our lot with the juggler.

when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.

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.

As we go through these motions, the Net delivers a steady stream of inputs to our visual, somatosensory, and auditory cortices.

The Net also provides a high-speed system for delivering responses and rewards—“positive reinforcements,” in psychological terms—which encourage the repetition of both physical and mental actions.

The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.

Because we’re often using our computers in a social context, to converse with friends or colleagues, to create “profiles” of ourselves, to broadcast our thoughts through blog posts or Facebook updates, our social standing is, in one way or another, always in play, always at risk. The resulting self-consciousness—even, at times, fear—magnifies the intensity of our involvement with the medium.

We focus intensively on the medium itself, on the flickering screen, but we’re distracted by the medium’s rapid-fire delivery of competing messages and stimuli.

We usually make better decisions, his experiments reveal, if we shift our attention away from a difficult mental challenge for a time. But Dijksterhuis’s work also shows that our unconscious thought processes don’t engage with a problem until we’ve clearly and consciously defined the problem.3 If we don’t have a particular intellectual goal in mind, Dijksterhuis writes, “unconscious thought does not occur.”

The Net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively.

What we’re not doing when we’re online also has neurological consequences. Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don’t fire together don’t wire together.

The brain recycles the disused neurons and synapses for other, more pressing work. We gain new skills and perspectives but lose old ones.

Book readers have a lot of activity in regions associated with language, memory, and visual processing, but they don’t display much activity in the prefrontal regions associated with decision making and problem solving.

The good news here is that Web surfing, because it engages so many brain functions, may help keep older people’s minds sharp.

But the extensive activity in the brains of surfers also points to why deep reading and other acts of sustained concentration become so difficult online.

The redirection of our mental resources, from reading words to making judgments, may be imperceptible to us—our brains are quick—but it’s been shown to impede comprehension and retention, particularly when it’s repeated frequently.

By allowing us to filter out distractions, to quiet the problem-solving functions of the frontal lobes, deep reading becomes a form of deep thinking. The mind of the experienced book reader is a calm mind, not a buzzing one. When it comes to the firing of our neurons, it’s a mistake to assume that more is better.

Working memory forms, in a very real sense, the contents of our consciousness at any given moment.