The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

They don’t necessarily read a page from left to right and from top to bottom. They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest.”

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.

Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking,

We can’t translate the new information into schemas. Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains shallow.

(Some studies link attention deficit disorder, or ADD, to the overloading of working memory.) Experiments indicate that as we reach the limits of our working memory, it becomes harder to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information, signal from noise. We become mindless consumers of data.

What we’re doing when we multitask “is learning to be skillful at a superficial level.”50 The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”

Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” commented Clifford Nass, the Stanford professor who led the research. “Everything distracts them.”53