Book Review-The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

The Shallows made many people’s must-read list when it first came out in 2010. All the movers and shakers in the tech world recommended it. I bought the book a few years later but never got around to reading it. A good friend recently read it and recommended it highly, which piqued my interest again.

First, Nicholas Carr is an excellent writer. He organized the research that illustrates and explains the thesis of this book very well. The chapters are organized to build progressively upon his thesis and each other as he leads the reader through his thoughts.

The key topic of the book is the subtitle: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Carr cites Marshall McLuhan often, and McLuhan’s thoughts on the medium: how the medium affects what we think and know is a well cited point. What Carr drives at with his thesis is that the medium also shapes how we think, which is a subtle, insidious, and transformational change in our cognition. One key point to remember is that we humans have a very adaptive mind, our cognition is so flexible and nimble that it does not take much to alter the way our minds learn and accept the changing modes of communication. It is a human trait that has served us well throughout our evolution and has gotten humans out of trouble many times. It is our cognitive flexibility and adaptability which makes human so successful at surviving for so long. At the same time, it is also a reason for concern, because as we adapt to the evolving modes of communication, our cognition and our habits will never be the same and we will never return to our previous state of cognition. One important point that Carr makes clear, as he references McLuhan, is that the new medium is not just an addition to the old medium, and the new medium won’t ever leave the old medium alone. The new medium will forever change and affect how humans interact with information.

Carr begins the book with some excellent general historical background on how human modes of communication had evolved. Starting with the Greek philosophers and their dependence on oratory as the only means of communicating ideas to their audience, through the evolution of the written language, to the western discovery of the printing press and the mass production of the means of passing on knowledge. He explores the ideas of the Empiricist versus the Rationalists, laying out the arguments for and against each and explaining how the reality is a synthesis of both rather than as an either/or proposition.

One of the more fascinating explorations is Carr’s discussion of the  invention of the map and the clock to illustrate his point. The advent of the map gave us an essential and efficient means of navigating the known world, the projected representation of the three-dimensional reality into two-dimensional map gave humans an easier means to navigate through the world, yet it also robbed the humans of their skills at visualizing the three-dimensional reality. It was the same argument with time. The clock gave us a more locally precise means of tracking the days, months, and years but at the same time, it chained us to the yoke of the clock, so that this artifice which was just supposed to facilitate our perception of the fourth dimension had irrevocably changed the way we think and how we deal with our reality. Time was no longer an artifice, a construct, it became reality.

Carr dives into many human inventions which had changed the way we live and survive in this world. How the addition of spaces between words, a significant change from the scriptum continua of the early literature, changed the way humans think. The word spacing freed the human mind to think and explore their thoughts deeply. As a parallel he talks about the effect that the hyperlink serves to disrupt deep reading and deep thinking. One thing he makes clear is that the hyperlink is yet another artifice that was employed to facilitate more in-depth explorations of the ideas imbued in the particular piece of reading, but our very adaptable and curious brain will inevitably shatter the once monolithic focus that we had developed through deep thinking and spurs us to chase after the shiny, glittery hyperlink, because we are curious. While this is an unwelcomed distraction, it also created an even more unwelcomed development: it trained our cognition to accept this kind of perusing as the norm. So it is that we are less able to concentrate, read and think deeply, and delve into complex and coupled concepts. This is an irreversible effect.

Carr pursues this line of thinking in the latter chapters of the book as he explores the contemporary brain and how we complain of distraction, yet at the same time we are unable and unwilling to quit the habit of juggling many pieces of information at once, even though we know, through psychological experiments, that the human brain is not capable of processing in a massively parallel manner, contrary to what has been believed for years.

Carr will intersperse personal asides and digressions to illustrate his points. These digressions were helpful in making his point for him as well as clear up many points. At the same time, I wonder if these distractions are a tool that Carr is using to make his point in a more meta manner.

At the end of the book, Carr explores the Church of Google and their vision regarding their future, and by proxy, the future of how we, the Google using public, are faced with; how our modes of cognition and thinking will evolve as the internet very quickly and organically changes us.

I will say that I became disturbed as I read the book. In the end however, despite the bleak dystopian future that Carr had painted for us, I finished the book thinking positively, as I now know, through this book, what is facing me and what I need to do. Whether I do what is necessary or whether I succeed in maintaining the best parts of my former cognitive habits is yet to be seen, but at least I know what the enemy looks like.