The Shallows
How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember
Nicholas Carr
Having read it
★★★★★
An insightful read that gets to the many issues that the internet and permanent digital connectivity brings to society, despite their supposed benefits. As mentioned, interpreted and proved by many a researcher and their test participants, smartphones (well, constant screen/device use) certainly seem to be making us dumber and many, worryingly, don’t seem to be too bothered that they might actually be less calm, measured, thoughtful, balanced or any other helpful adjective despite the supposed technological efficiencies and benefits that ‘assist’ them doing and achieving stuff that doesn’t really assist or achieve stuff.
Still, reading books is good for you, as this quote from the book says:
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.
Also, it was a relevant book when it was published in 2010 and is even more so these days of rampant chasing and collating of data that can then be moulded and manipulated for all sorts of reasons (but probably mostly just profit) and that then don’t really seem to help society, despite their supposed ‘features’; it’s 2020 afterword is a great complement to current times and our seemingly non-stop approach to the ‘wonders’ of digital technology.
Anyway, despite the book’s clarity and its focus and interpretation of research for the inquisitive and interested reader of these kinds of things, it does all feel a bit like society keeps running and never stops to help (and save) itself with a little ambling and time spent contemplating.
We’ve only got ourselves to blame and technology isn’t (necessarily) going to solve our problem(s).
A good passage
The Internet, however, wasn’t built by educators to optimise learning. It presents information not in a carefully balanced way but as a concentration-fragmenting mishmash.
The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.
A second good passage
Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively. ‘Does optimising for multitasking result in better functioning – that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no,’ says Grafman. ‘The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.’ You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.48 David Meyer, a University of Michigan neuroscientist and one of the leading experts on multitasking, makes a similar point. As we gain more experience in rapidly shifting our attention, we may ‘overcome some of the inefficiencies’ inherent in multitasking, he says, ‘but except in rare circumstances, you can train until you’re blue in the face and you’d never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time.’49 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.’51
A third good passage
The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted – to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web’s information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the Net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers.