Is the Internet Making Us Stupid? Thoughts on Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows.

For the most part, I prefer to spend my reading time in the world of make-believe, vastly preferring fiction to well, reality. Every once in a while, though, something from the land of non-fiction really grabs my interest. This time it was Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. The book expands on his famous Atlantic cover story, Is Google Making Us Stupid? where he posed the question: Are we losing our ability to read and think deeply?

The premise is that the scattered, multi-tasking and distracted lives we live have been proliferating for decades, and that now we have—with the Internet–the perfect medium for scattering our attention. Carr says to think of it as trying to read a book while doing a crossword puzzle.

The genesis of him writing the book, and the part that really resonated for me, can be found on Page 5:

“Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Sound familiar? It sure did to me. What I really liked was the balance in the book–this isn’t a trash piece on the Net—in fact, Carr spends a lot of time talking about technological innovations through history as well as the great benefits of the Internet (obviously an invaluable tool for a reporter). He goes on:

“The boons are real. But they come at a price. Media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Whether we want to admit it or not, the Internet and emerging information technology carries an ethos to it. With books, the focus is on deep, contemplative thought. With the Internet, it’s the rapid, hyper-distracted sampling of small bits of info from multiple sources.  Now that we’re all getting used to the Internet as part of our daily lives, we’re getting better at scanning and skimming, but at the risk of losing our capacity for concentration, contemplation and reflection.

Obviously, the implications are scary—as we become used to constant interruption (how many emails have popped up on your screen while you’ve read this? How many times has your iPhone buzzed? Your TweetDeck chirped?) we may even lose the ability to tune into more subtle forms of human emotion like empathy and compassion.

To hear a radio interview with Carr about The Shallows, click here.

My opinion? There’s really no going back, and it’s naïve to think the technology we use in our daily lives will regress. Still, I believe (as Carr states) that we can get better at both types of thinking, so I’m going to make more of an effort to have that quiet, unplugged, contemplative time. How about you? Have you felt your ability to concentrate slipping? What do you do about it? Please comment below!