The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicolas Carr (2010):
"We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information… And so we ask the Internet to keep interrupting us, in ever more and different ways. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive. Tuning out is not an option many of us would consider." (p. 133-4)
Have you ever wondered who has really the crazy behaviour on here? Should I be ashamed to even try to put forward a complex set of thoughts by means of these kinds of postings that some brand now as being too intellectual or even pseudo-intellectual? Well, “Is Google making us stupid?” is a similar question Nicholas Carr once posed in an Atlantic Monthly cover story more than one decade ago already. Creepily erry indeed. So lets have a look back at the oldtimer of a book.
Like myself in a previous posting Carr tapped into a well of anxiety, upset and unrest that's hanging over us only recently. Perhaps since the beginning of the millenium the majority of people is done with questioning the Internet and that's indeed already changing us. As we enjoy the electronic high way as one of the bounties of our time, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Carr's book was one of the first true explorations of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences since we stopped questioning the purpose and are already changing ourselves towards it.
Carr described 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. Our brain, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, changed during the centuries in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways, and that's yet another fact and not an alternative fact to take into account already. Although the book overemphasized neuroscience and overlooked swaths of highly relevant cognitive science, yes, it's in essence about problems that rather cognitive science deals with.
However, such criticism kept in mind, Carr argued also: “Those who celebrate the ‘outsourcing’ of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor” (p. 191), and "When a person fails to consolidate a fact, an idea, or an experience in long-term memory, he’s not ‘freeing-up’ space in his brain for other functions” (p. 192). Oh yes, we're losing all that wisdom and experience, or at least dulling our intellects in the process of farming out that learning process to the WorldWideWeb. We're living in a world now where we have indeed access to more and better forms of inputs than ever before, and yet precisely because of that we have become more scatter-brained and distracted.
He explained 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. One could argue that its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption―and it's 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. That's the definite conclusion coming out of this book.
One could argue that its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption―and it's remaking us in its own image.
That was a process underway well before the advent of the internet. A society that values knowledge only for its material utility and systematically undervalues its teachers, thinkers and dreamers (not to mention librarians), will increasingly take on the appearance of a dreary office environment.
