Diving into The Shallows
By: Taylor Barkley, Program Officer for Tech and Innovation at Stand Together
Given the subject matter of The Shallows, it seems necessary to state up front that I read the 2011 paperback edition of this book. No dreaded hyperlinks here! Although I did appreciate the footnotes, so hyperlinks may have been handy.
Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains is a book I’ve known about since at least the mid-2010s, but had not read until this year. It is a book cited in speeches, podcasts, policy papers, sermons, and of course other books. Carr’s work in The Shallows seems to have risen to the status of canon in the context of technology critique. Ten years after its publication seemed the right time to read and review it.
I was also behind on other Carr readings, so on this 10th anniversary decided to read his three recent books. It has been a pleasant month diving into a part of Nicholas Carr’s mind.
In The Shallows, I was struck by how the bulk of the work does not deal with “the internet,” words that are, after all, in the subtitle. The first 140 pages are an intriguing yet brief history of the written word and books. More strictly, it is a history of the ways in which humans have communicated and transmitted their thoughts to others in spoken and then written form. It is woven throughout with citations to various studies on how the writing and reading processes affect the human brain.
The book begins with a story from the author. Analogizing himself to Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey where Hal tells Dave he feels his mind going as Dave disconnects key components in Hal’s computer “brain.” Where once he felt he could focus for long periods on reading or other projects, now he feels “fidgety” and “lose[s] the thread.” The culprit? “The Net.”
As a brief aside, “the Net” is one of the few ways in which this book feels its date. The other is a reference to MySpace in a list of major social media companies from which to choose. Still, The Shallows has perhaps aged better than other technology books. The thesis at least has proven viable and relevant from Carr’s essay on which the book is based in the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” The other glaring omission is any extensive discussion of the smartphone and its impacts.
If a summary of The Shallows has to be made in two sentences it is there at the start: “The boons are real. But they come at a price.” This is the theme of nearly all technology critiques that border on the formula: invite the reader in with a dire prognosis about some popular or emerging technology, list the negative effects, but then two-thirds of the way down, state how the author is no Luddite and in fact technology has many benefits, end with dire thesis. If I have a major critique of The Shallows, this is it. The price we pay to use digital technologies are our brain power. But it sure is a help!
Carr backs up his own subjective evidence in the introductory chapter with anecdotes from three other people. One friend lamented that he can’t read War and Peace anymore. Another that he “stopped reading books altogether.” Indeed, he asks readers to examine or reflect on their own sense of unease about lack of focus or other ailments. At the outset there is no other evidence offered to connect these feelings of unease to the internet other than subjective experience. In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Carr confirms that many of the arguments in The Shallows are subjective and open for debate.
Indeed, this is where I would start. Why point to the internet as the reason? What else is going on in your life? What other stressors, voices, pains, worries, or preferences are pulling on your attention? I read War and Peace two years ago under a full dose of the internet. Carr’s writing in these earlier passages reflect a scapegoat that too often is asserted without critique. The internet becomes a scapegoat for all human ills.
But for the internet we would have a President Hillary Clinton. But for the internet climate change would be solved. But for the internet we wouldn’t be so angry. But for the internet we wouldn’t be so polarized. And with this book, but for the internet we wouldn’t be so stupid.
In the main body of the book there are many helpful tidbits and stories. For instance, Carr’s outline of the four categories of technologies in chapter three. The excellent chapter four that walks through a history of words written on paper and some hilarious pessimistic reactions a la Pessimists Archive, like the bookseller who was run out of Paris on “suspicion of being in league with the devil” for selling books. This chapter relies heavily on Elizabeth Eisenstein’s book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. These historical anecdotes of early worries in the Europe of the 1500s just after Gutenberg’s printing press launched cheap and available literature into the world echo today’s worries about the proliferation of information via the internet absent gatekeepers. However, there is no acknowledgement of these negative reactions and The Shallows proceeds apace as if there is no lesson to be learned from these historical reactions. And that may be the case, but the matter is not considered one way or the other.
I wonder what Nicholas Carr of 2010 would have thought of the time we spend on the internet now. In chapter five he offers up a litany of statistics to demonstrate the increased time that people are spending online. It seems to be a shock factor. If only he knew how “bad” it could get! Then later in chapter five, in perhaps the section of objective facts that suggested a future worse than the one we are in, he outlines the decline of newspapers, including The Washington Post. Of course, things did look dire then, and continue to be difficult for numerous small papers. But The Post and other major papers such as The New York Times have been able to turn around the slide and are hiring more journalists.
The second major flub is at the start of chapter six. He cites the decline business publishers have suffered as eyes have shifted from the page to the screen. But by certain indicators, business for publishers is better than ever. This was a point I kept returning to in my own mind. Through The Shallows it is clear Carr loves literature and writing. He seems to be a very curious fellow, ravenous for literature and new information. Frankly, these are traits I admire in his writing.
But book sales are higher than ever now. Combine those numbers with the availability and boom of information available for free (non-priced), we are living in an age of super abundance. I don’t have time, even if I dedicated myself full-time to reading, to read all the things that merely interest me, let alone the works I should read for my edification that lie outside my strict interests. This reality seems to undermine a key point of evidence in Carr’s argument. Aside from COVID-19 impacts, independent booksellers, and books overall are doing well. Perhaps one could quibble that buying books is different than reading books. That of course requires more analysis.
About two-thirds of the way through the book, Carr’s writing starts turning more dire. This is the content I expected. Some highlights: Citing an interview with neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, who says the consequences of the internet’s effects on our brains could prove “deadly”; “We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls”; “The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation”; “Outsource memory, and culture withers.”
Chapter eight, “The Church of Google,” is a specific application of Carr’s riff that the internet has systematized information at the expense of deep reading and our organic approach to information. It is full of quotes from Google’s founders and former executive officers Larry Page and Sergey Brin as well as former CEO Erich Schmidt that seem to be an attempt to scare the reader of The Shallows by demonstrating the ulterior motives of one of the world’s largest companies. The chapter ends with an interesting, short paragraph:
Google is neither God nor Satan, and if there are shadows in the Googleplex they’re no more than the delusions of grandeur. What’s disturbing about the company’s founders is not their boyish desire to create an amazingly cool machine that will be able to outthink its creators, but the pinched conception of the human mind that gives rise to such desire.
He should have finished the thought and explained an alternative way of thinking. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power suffers from an equal lack of detail about the alternative. When I read Zuboff’s book, I waited intently throughout the over 500 pages for her to explain what a better system than the one she was critiquing might look like. Likewise, with Carr in chapter eight. If Brin, Page, Schmidt et al have such devious views, but those views brought about these products billions of people use, what is the worldview they should adopt? I’m not convinced a worldview other than the one they had would have brought about such useful technology.
Perhaps I misunderstand the role of the critic and am thinking through the lens of public policy writing, of which I am most familiar. Carr and Zuboff would probably say the alternatives are best left to the reader to develop and deploy.
Chapter nine summarizes research into memory physiology, neuroscience, and the workings of the brain, mainly focusing on memory. It is an impressive survey of medical and scientific literature and offers a compelling case that the internet is affecting our mental capacity to recall facts or develop creative thoughts. As Carr succinctly notes, “The Web is a technology of forgetfulness.”
The conclusions of chapter nine carry over into chapter 10, where he discusses how simplicity in software design can be deleterious to our memory capacity. Again, as succinctly stated, “The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.” That particular sentence, though, is backed up by an experiment in 2003 from a Dutch cognitive psychologist, Cristof van Nimwegen. Carr struggles with what to do with such findings because he admittedly, during a chapter interlude, regularly uses and quickly adopts new technologies. Such a struggle highlights broader issues with the genre of technology critiques.
Both chapters imply and offer scientific evidence that harder cognitive tasks are better for our brains. Such tasks are like weightlifting for our neurons. But where do these critics draw the line? Carr latter laments his declining skill in longhand writing. Is writing in stone better than because it is harder and takes longer? Where is the line drawn between convenience, speed, cognitive effort, aesthetic pleasure, and other squishy notions? It remains unstated here and elsewhere. The best we can get is a reference to the cutting-edge technology of the previous generation, which of course carried its own critiques.
The Shallows obviously scratches an itch and fills a felt need. People are still buying it and it has a 10th anniversary printing. It is one perspective on the effects of the internet with compelling research summaries that aim to prove the internet as the original sin for any contemporary ennui or malaise. Perhaps this is the primary critique and not to Carr’s fault but to our own misunderstanding of the book’s purpose.
What is held up as an objective, prescriptive diagnosis of society-wide ills is instead one man’s exploration of his struggle with these tenuous lines between the appropriate amount of technology use. That’s on us and maybe the book’s marketers, not on Carr.
Given that context, I would recommend reading this book alongside Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better and Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. The meta-critique of technology critique is that these issues are perceived as one-sided: Serious thinkers are worried about the effects of technology and/or the internet and therefore you should be too; non-serious thinkers take the opposing position. That’s just not the case.
As Carr notes, our experiences with technology vary from person to person. He is correct to point out that we should examine our uses of technology. How are we using our tools? How do those uses make us feel? Are they encouraging or hindering healthy behaviors? But blaming tools for all ills will shortcut the critical and helpful self-reflection we can all endorse.
