The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.19

The Net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.

“The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.”

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 strip-mining of “relevant content” replaces the slow excavation of meaning.

The calculator, a powerful but highly specialized tool, turned out to be an aid to memory. The Web is a technology of forgetfulness.

Culture is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as “the world’s information.” It’s more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net.

We shouldn’t allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we’ve numbed an essential part of our self.

HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence. Afterword

MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle published Alone Together, a deeply researched, deeply disturbing examination of how the communication technologies intended to bring us together may be pushing us apart.