Reaction to The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
I just finished reading The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. The book is an argument about the effects of technology on our intellectual lives. Though it focuses on Internet applications (e-mail, the World Wide Web, social networking, et cetera), it frames its discussion within the whole history of information technology, starting with the invention of writing.
Carr’s argument, in summary, is that the ways we communicate shape how we think. For example, a story may be told both in a novel and in a play, but the author and the audience will experience the story differently depending on the medium.
Another example: a printed news article stands alone, but its electronic equivalent contains hyperlinks to an entire world of related information. This potentially enriches and deepens the reader’s understanding of a topic, because it’s easy for her to find related information. However, Carr cites research showing that reading a hypertext document uses more of the brain’s “working memory” than an ordinary one. Rather than concentrating on the text, the reader must constantly evaluate embedded links and decide whether to follow them, not to mention all the other visual distractions typically present while using a computer connected to the Internet.
As a result, the reader is less able to understand and remember what she is reading. The reader also has a harder time building connections among what she does learn and experiencing the emotional content of the information. In other words, the power to access lots of information quickly comes at the price of our comprehension of the information retrieved.
Carr points out that publishers of electronic content have lots of incentive to exacerbate this problem. There’s no rule that every Web page must be littered with hyperlinks or that an online music store should bombard visitors with “similar music;” but Google profits from every search its users perform and every e-mail message they send or receive. A news Web site profits from every article its visitors retrieve, not every article they read.
Carr ends by re-framing the computer within technology in general. All technology increases our power while numbing us to our exercise of it. The airplane travels at great speed, but its passengers have little experience of the distance traveled. A farmer can plow or harvest more land by machine than by hand, but he does so sitting in a climate-controlled bubble, never touching the soil with his hands. Carr quotes this passage from the Old Testament:
Their idols are silver and gold,
The work of men’s hands.
They have mouths, but they speak not;
Eyes have they, but they see not;
They have ears, but they hear not;
Noses have they, but they smell not;
They have hands, but they handle not;
Feet have they, but they walk not;
Neither speak they through their throat.
They that make them are like unto them;
So is everyone that trusteth in them.
I found this last chapter to be the book’s most powerful. To build technology and incorporate it into our persons is part of what makes us human. Indeed, Carr celebrates this. However, he wants us to think carefully about the trade-offs it brings.
The book’s arguments are compelling to the extent one finds the cited research credible. They certainly match my personal experience with using the Internet, as well as the difficulties I’ve been having concentrating on longer articles, books, and “intellectual projects” in general. What Carr doesn’t offer is a prescription for managing information technology and mitigating its negative effects on the mind. I find myself wanting one. Perhaps I will have more to share on that later.
There is, of course, more to the book than what I’ve summarized here. If you want to learn about how technology—from the invention of the alphabet to the World Wide Web—shapes human culture and intellect, then The Shallows is worth reading.