The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

Even as a young boy, he had dreamed of creating a momentous invention, something that “would change the world.”

It took only a few months for Page to land on a topic for his dissertation: the vast new computer network called the World Wide Web.

Page had an idea that he thought might unlock some of its secrets. He had realized that the links on Web pages are analogous to the citations in academic papers.

The more citations a paper garners, the more prestige it gains in its field. In the same way, when a person with a Web page links to someone else’s page, she is saying that she thinks the other page is important.

A page with a lot of incoming links has more authority than a page with only one or two. The greater the authority of a Web page, the greater the worth of its own outgoing links.

Page’s analogy led him to realize that the relative value of any Web page could be estimated through a mathematical analysis of two factors: the number of incoming links the page attracted and the authority of the sites that were the sources of those links.

The dissertation never got written. Page recruited another Stanford graduate student, a math prodigy named Sergey Brin who had a deep interest in data mining, to help him build his search engine.

They chose the name—a play on googol, the word for the number ten raised to the hundredth power—to highlight their goal of organizing “a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.”

But it faced the same problem that had doomed many dot-coms: it hadn’t been able to figure out how to turn a profit from all that traffic.

An ad’s placement would be determined not only by the amount of the bid but by the frequency with which people actually clicked on the ad. That innovation ensured that Google’s ads would remain, as the company put it, “relevant” to the topics of searches.

The auction system, named AdWords, had another, very important result: by tying ad placement to clicks, it increased click-through rates substantially.

The more sites and links Google evaluates, the more precisely it can classify pages and rank their quality. And as traffic increases, Google is able to collect more behavioral data, allowing it to tailor its search results and advertisements ever more precisely to users’ needs and desires.

The intellectual technologies it has pioneered promote the speedy, superficial skimming of information and discourage any deep, prolonged engagement with a single argument, idea, or narrative.

Every click we make on the Web marks a break in our concentration, a bottom-up disruption of our attention—and it’s in Google’s economic interest to make sure we click as often as possible. The last thing the company wants is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. Google is, quite literally, in the business of distraction.

By turning intimate messages—once the realm of the letter, the phone call, the whisper—into fodder for a new form of mass media, the social networks have given people a compelling new way to socialize and stay in touch.

Unlike early book printers, who had strong economic incentives to promote the reading of older works as well as recent ones, online publishers battle to distribute the newest of the new.

Google not only identifies new or revised Web pages much more quickly than it used to—it now checks the most popular sites for updates every few seconds rather than every few days—but for many searches it skews its results to favor newer pages over older ones.

For Google, everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. As people spend more time and do more things online, they see more ads and they disclose more information about themselves—and Google rakes in more money.

Nearly everything the company does is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. Google wants information to be free because, as the cost of information falls, we all spend more time looking at computer screens and the company’s profits go up.

Its ideals and its business interests converge in one overarching goal: to digitize ever more types of information, move the information onto the Web, feed it into its database, run it through its classification and ranking algorithms, and dispense it in what it calls “snippets” to Web surfers, preferably with ads in tow.

Google “has become a true believer in its own goodness, a belief which justifies its own set of rules regarding corporate ethics, anti-competition, customer service and its place in society.”

To make a book discoverable and searchable online is also to dismember it. The cohesion of its text, the linearity of its argument or narrative as it flows through scores of pages, is sacrificed.

For Google, with its faith in efficiency as the ultimate good and its attendant desire “to get users in and out really quickly,” the unbinding of the book entails no loss, only gain.

The great library that Google is rushing to create shouldn’t be confused with the libraries we’ve known up until now. It’s not a library of books. It’s a library of snippets.

The tension between the two perspectives is one manifestation of the broader conflict between, in Marx’s terms, “the machine” and “the garden”—the industrial ideal and the pastoral ideal—that has played such an important role in shaping modern society.

There needs to be time for efficient data collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine and time to sit idly in the garden.

He proposed a new kind of personal cataloguing machine, called a memex, that would be useful not only to scientists but to anyone employing “logical processes of thought.”

But even though Bush’s vision has been fulfilled to an extent beyond anything he could have imagined in his own lifetime—we are surrounded by the memex’s offspring—the problem he set out to solve, information overload, has not abated.

In retrospect, the reason for the failure seems obvious. By dramatically reducing the cost of creating, storing, and sharing information, computer networks have placed far more information within our reach than we ever had access to before.

It was once understood that the most effective filter of human thought is time.

We no longer have the patience to await time’s slow and scrupulous winnowing.

If our brains are computers, then intelligence can be reduced to a matter of productivity—of running more bits of data more quickly through the big chip in our skull. Human intelligence becomes indistinguishable from machine intelligence.

It underscores the firmness and the certainty with which Google holds to its Taylorist belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.

Changes in the mind cause changes in the brain, and vice versa.” To create a computer model of the brain that would accurately simulate the mind would require the replication of “every level of the brain that affects and is affected by the mind.”

As people grew accustomed to writing down their thoughts and reading the thoughts others had written down, they became less dependent on the contents of their own memory.

Books provided people with a far greater and more diverse supply of facts, opinions, ideas, and stories than had been available before, and both the method and the culture of deep reading encouraged the commitment of printed information to memory.

Because every person was free to chart his own course of reading, to define his own syllabus, individual memory became less of a socially determined construct and more the foundation of a distinctive perspective and personality.

To him, memorizing was far more than a means of storage. It was the first step in a process of synthesis, a process that led to a deeper and more personal understanding of one’s reading.

Far from being a mechanical, mindless process, Erasmus’s brand of memorization engaged the mind fully. It required, Rummel writes, “creativeness and judgment.”

Erasmus’s recommendation that every reader keep a notebook of memorable quotations was widely and enthusiastically followed. Such notebooks, which came to be called “commonplace books,” or just “commonplaces,” became fixtures of Renaissance schooling.

The popularity of commonplace books ebbed as the pace of life quickened in the nineteenth century, and by the middle of the twentieth century memorization itself had begun to fall from favor.

What had long been viewed as a stimulus for personal insight and creativity came to be seen as a barrier to imagination and then simply as a waste of mental energy.

“Why memorize the content of a single book when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we now store it digitally and just remember what we stored.”

Not only has memory lost its divinity; it’s well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine.

how, exactly, does the brain transform fleeting short-term memories, such as the ones that enter and exit our working memory every waking moment, into the long-term memories that can last a lifetime?

Such observations implied that a memory, even a strong one, remains unstable for a brief period after it’s formed. A certain amount of time seemed to be required for a primary, or short-term, memory to be transformed into a secondary, or long-term, one.

Short-term memories don’t become long-term memories immediately, and the process of their consolidation is delicate. Any disruption, whether a jab to the head or a simple distraction, can sweep the nascent memories from the mind.

The two types of memory entail different biological processes. Storing long-term memories requires the synthesis of new proteins. Storing short-term memories does not.

When they examined the physiological effects of repetition on individual neurons and synapses, they discovered something amazing. Not only did the concentration of neurotransmitters in synapses change, altering the strength of the existing connections between neurons, but the neurons grew entirely new synaptic terminals.

That explained, Kandel realized, why memory consolidation requires new proteins. Proteins play an essential role in producing structural changes in cells.