The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

How does technology change the way we think? Not just the internet, but the clock, language, and print. How does the medium of a message change our understanding of it? The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr, explores how technology has impacted thought from the invention of language to the internet.

Carr talks about the plasticity of the brain. How the brain can remap itself to perform better in its environment. While many believe that the brain stops developing once a person reaches adulthood, the brain retains plasticity even if it isn’t as much as you would see in a younger brain. This makes sense as adults can still learn new skills and grow as people. However, the paths in a person’s brain get more rigid the more they are used in the same way so there is truth to the adage, “You can’t teach old dogs new tricks.” If you’ve only done one thing your whole life, then it can be very difficult to form new paths and let the very rigid ones fade. I’m not going to pretend like I’m a neuroscientist, I am after all paraphrasing what I read in a book that was written by someone paraphrasing neuroscientists so pardon any misconceptions on my part. The point is that human brains are flexible, but they are not perfectly elastic.

Historically, when a new piece of technology is released there have always been those that protest the change. Whether it’s out of fear, attachment to the status quo, or some other reason. I can’t blame people for resisting technological advancements. Carr cites research that shows how technological advancements change the way people think and express themselves. As Friedrich Nietzsche’s writing changed when he learned to type on a metal ball, so does my writing change depending on whether I use a keyboard or a pencil. Am I necessarily a better writer with a keyboard? Am I allowing the convenience of an electronic display to handicap my writing? Shouldn’t I care if I’m sacrificing the quality of my thoughts and making sure that I am choosing the best option for me? Carr refers to Socrates’ distaste at the thought of people writing down knowledge as it would make them comfortable with forgetting it. Carr seems to believe that Socrates was right but was just early. That it wasn’t writing or print that made people forgetful, but the Net. The platform that many believe allows us to know more is making us learn less. Memorization is dead and humanness is being eradicated. This is what the book is really about.

Carr cites several studies that showed that the use of the Internet leads to decreased retention, focus, problem-solving, and memory development. Because people skim webpages differently than they read more traditional text and the Internet is designed to keep you moving from one page to the next, users have a hard time digesting and processing everything they take in. Carr describes Google as a platform that puts the brain in “perpetual locomotion,” giving us a hunter/gatherer mentality when it comes to finding information. The inability of people to take time to reflect on what they see is what is hurting retention as rest is needed to convert short-term memories into long-term ones. This and the fact that because information is so accessible, people don’t feel the need to remember it.

The internet-driven minds have a hard time with the recall of information gained from the internet. Their devices have become extensions of themselves, and they view information gained on the platform if only to be forgotten a minute later, as information that they know. This is because people, who possess a tool, learn to think of a tool as a part of themselves. This behavior was observed in primates who, after learning to use a tool, would think of the tool as a part of themselves. Knowing this, it makes sense that people would think of a laptop or smartphone as part of themselves. They spend nearly all day with them and can communicate with them without much active thought. This dependency is worrisome. While calling it the death of humanness may be a little too far, it does feel like we’re giving up something that maybe we shouldn’t. But people hardly choose to do things the harder way.

The Shallows was first published in 2010. The edition that I read had an updated 2020 afterward that talked more about the rise of mobile phones since then. Because most of the text was written almost a decade and a half ago, some parts are somewhat dated. At the time, laptops and desktop computers were the primary gateway to the Internet. Although the afterward agreed with my assessment, things have gotten worse, not better. Carr briefly talked about studies that showed that the mere presence of a person's cell phone made them perform worse when it came to mentally taxing things like learning. I would have loved to read about his thoughts on how AI is slowly replacing the workforce and the effects AI is most likely going to have on a generation of people who never learned how to write for themselves, and who have been taught to prompt engineer their thoughts. I even checked his blog for something on the subject but only found one reference to GPT-3. I wouldn’t be surprised if his next book tackled the subject.

While I did find some assumptions about tech a bit rash, like implying that Google was conspiring something almost satanic, Carr makes a lot of sense. Is technology making us worse people? Are we solidifying bad pathways in our brain that inhibit our potential? How many generations before we lose the ability to learn? It’s self-preservation for Carr to want a world where deep reading isn’t dead, but maybe we should all be fighting for it. Maybe it’s already too late. We can’t seem to help going down this road. I’ll have to reread this later if I remember to. For now, I’m going to see what’s going on on LinkedIn. I’ll revisit it when… What was I talking about?