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.

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.

I cannot recommend this highly enough.

When I first heard about it I was sceptical. Of course people do, and have always, mourned the changes when we switch from one technology to another. When it is such fundamental aspect of our shared existence, such as how we share and acquire knowledge then it is bound to have its critics. But these arguments go all the way back to the switch form an oral tradition to a written one. So whats new?

Carr takes you through all these changes and documents the huge changes they have made to how we consume information, the way people create information and share knowledge, the impacts on society and the individual and ultimately on how we think. The changes brought by the internet on our thinking processes are profound and the research that proves these changes is very well described.

A great read.