- Hardcover: 276 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co. (15 Jun 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0393072223
- ISBN-13: 978-0393072228
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.4 x 2.7 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 144,044 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
The best book I read last year and by best I really just mean the book that made the strongest impression on me was The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr. Like most people, I had some strong intuitions about how my life and the world have been changing in response to the Internet. But I could neither put those intuitions into an argument, nor be sure that they had any basis in the first place. Carr persuasively and with great subtlety and beauty makes the case that it is not only the content of our thoughts that are radically altered by phones and computers, but the structure of our brains our ability to have certain kinds of thoughts and experiences. And the kinds of thoughts and experiences at stake are those that have defined our humanity. Carr is not a proselytizer, and he is no techno-troglodyte. He is a profoundly sharp thinker and writer equal parts journalist, psychologist, popular science writer, and philosopher. I have not only given this book to numerous friends, I actually changed
Product Description
The best-selling author of The Big Switch returns with an explosive look at technology’s effect on the mind. “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?
Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.
Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.
Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.
Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.
Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.
Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful about the Net,
By
This review is from: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Hardcover)
This summer I got my eyes on a title that looked interesting, Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows - What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains". It's follow up to his article from 2008 in the journal The Atlantic with the even more provocative headline "Is Google Making Us Stupid?". Nicholas Carr is an IT-journalist and writer of several books within media and communications development.
Carr's standpoint for his article and book is his own anxiety that he of late finds it difficult to concentrate for longer periods of time, finds it more and more difficult to read longer articles, or books. When discussing this with friends and colleagues, he found that there were many among them that had observed the same phenomena in their own life. One early reference in "The Shallows" is to Marshall McLuhan, and Carr not only subscribe to the McLuhan phrase "The Medium is the Message", but stress that what McLuhan actually tried to point out is that the medium, the communication tools we use, will actually change the user. For good or for worse. While it's good that we learn how to multitask, learn how to make rapid decisions on which hyperlinks are worth following up and which one is to quickly ignore, we are quickly reprogramming the brain to adapt to mainly use short term memory and fragments of information, rather than using contemplation and deep reading to transfer digested data and transfer it to knowledge, stored in long term memory. While the book is rich on references, some critics has pointed out that they are mainly selected to prove Carr's point, a classic mistake in formal research. Other suggest that Carr fail to point out all the benefits of the Internet, and focus too much on some possible risks. While I tend to agree on the first point, I must say he actually show a lot of examples on how useful and attractive the Net is. This is actually in the core of the problem. We are tempted to check our email inbox every second minute, follow up discussions on Twitter and blogs, comment on comments from friends on Facebook, surf Wikipedia and the Internet in general for a kind of interesting stuff - there is an enormous pull from the Internet, and we spend more and more time in front of the computer because of this. And it affects us. It reprograms our brain, and we should at least be aware of it. You may or may not agree with Nicholas Carr, but his book is definitely well worth reading. That is if you can focus this long, indulge yourself in a 250 pages book, for several hours! If not - perhaps you have proved Carr correct, involuntarily.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Surprisingly interesting!,
This review is from: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Hardcover)
I have always been a little dubious about the benefits of the internet and its effects on the brain. I was expecting this book to be more of a social commentary, or basically a rant - but it is actually really fascinating! It goes into the development of language and technology, charting the changes to society and the human brain. Really informative and thought-provoking.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A cybersocial commentary,
By Felix Valencia "thebigfellow" (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Paperback)
The blurb claims this book to be a "Silent Spring" for the literary mind. That is certainly comparing apples to oranges, but at the core to this book there is a thought-provoking argument about the impact of various technologies on the workings of the mind. Carr's main thesis (to be found almost in its entirety in his article "Is Google making us stupid?") is that the Internet is changing our minds, our ability to think and the way we use our memories, and all this not necessarily for the better. Essentially, the Internet is a universe of distractions, offering endless light entertainments and pointless interruptions that train our brains into an addictive shallow pattern of ineffectual multitasking. We hold up the new technology on a pedestal as a doorway to a new world of knowledge and communication, bringing with it benefits for social interaction, personal liberty and scientific endeavour, but Carr claims that this portal is not without its drawbacks vitiating our ability to think deeply, or use our memories effectively.Whilst much of the furore that came after the publication of his article/this book ascribes him to being a drum-bashing technophobe, there is little Luddite rhetoric here, and this book is far from the grandiloquent jeremiad its often labelled as being. The book itself is largely well-written, with the core argument never far from the narrative, and there is plenty of research here to back up the claims. Certainly this is no serious scholarly work, the charge often levelled at Carr that he only cherry-picked research findings which bolstered his main argument is probably justified, but there is enough food here for thought. The arguments of the aforementioned article have been padded out with some interesting historical background, findings from the realms of neuroscience and psychology, and parallels to other technological shifts, but at times it does feel like one is reading an undergraduate essay hurried off to a deadline: a string of hopefully worthy quotes, strung together by the occasionally conjunction ("..." and "...", however "..."). The best chapters are those which don't shy away from using the personal pronoun 'I' and reflect the authors own observant struggles with the new age technologies, and the sadly all too short chapter on the Internet's influence on our use of memory is of its own a very thought-provoking aside. At less than 250 sparsely-packed pages, this is a book that shouldn't exhaust even the attention span of the novus homo it describes. It should be of interest to people born both sides of the Internet divide, and the well-researched reports on historical parallels and psychological aspects offer plenty of titbits for our minds to work on. The reproach that Carr offers no solutions to the problematic developments he highlights is, in my opinion, to the book's strengths not weaknesses. It is a commentary, rather than a critique. Social change can be halted about as easily as the tides, though we might as individuals choose to tread our own paths. But it behoves us all well to acknowledge Change's existence.
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