“The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we read, think and remember” — Nicholas Carr (2010)

Just as Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (1985) critiqued the transformative nature television was having on human culture and the human brain, so Carr’s book tackles similar themes in relation to the internet 25 years on. Even more disturbing than Postman’s title, The Shallows describes what appears an extension and an acceleration of several themes of the earlier title.
Carr looks at how the internet transforms the brain’s perception of reality — as significant tools always have — for instance the map transformed human perception of space, and the clock transformed human perception of time. We don’t simply use tools to facilitate what we do- the medium of the tool transforms our perception of reality and consequently our concept of what it is that we should do. We don’t simply use tools, rather tools also use us.
Key to the transformative potential the internet has on the brain is brain plasticity. Only in the 20thcentury did scientists begin to really understand that the brain is not fixed matter. The book quotes British biologist J.Z. Young in 1950; “There is evidence that the cells of our brains literally develop and grow bigger with use, and atophy or waste away with disuse. It may be therefore that every action leaves some permanent print upon the nervous tissue”.
An experiment by Juan Pascual-Leone showed that neurologically we become what we think. He taught a group of people with no experience of piano a simple melody; then for five days he had half the group practice playing the melody and half the group simply to imagine playing the melody, without even touching the keys. The brains of the participants were mapped and found that the neurological changes in those imagining the action were the same as those actually playing piano.

Chapter 10 discusses Joseph Weizenbaum (1923–2008); one of the fathers of Artificial Intelligence, Wiezenbaum soon came to be disturbed by the nature of interaction between humans and machines (see the ELIZA Program) and by the 1970s had become an opponent of AI. His view was that what is most human about us is that which is least calculable, and that this element of ourselves is eroded as we merge our neurological processes with those of machines.
