Nicholas Carr's Shallows

A few things crossed my mind, repeatedly, as I read through Nicholas Carr's excellent The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, a book which thoroughly and persuasively demonstrates (or so I think, anyway) that an over-reliance upon electronic technologies, and the internet in particular, for our information, entertainment, and research, is doing real harm to our ability to think. In no particular order:

1) I thought about how President Obama has regularly, both before his election and after, criticized the huge presence which electronic and video gaming, networking, and communication plays in the lives of young Americans--and also about how little many of those same young people, including many who generally agree with the president's policies, either get angry or just shake their heads in bemusement, assuming that his message much be a politically calculated effort to look like a "tough parent" for suburban audiences, never considering whether there might be some genuine science--not just anthropological and sociological, but psychological and neurological as well--behind his concerns. Would Carr's book ever reach that audience? I'm hopeful, but doubtful.

2) I thought about my own history use of the internet, of blogs and e-mail and all the rest, and the weird compromises our family has made in regards to digital and wireless technologies. We resisted cell phones for years, but then ultimately broke down; now Melissa and my oldest daughter carry theirs everywhere. We went without a high-speed internet connection for the longest time, then changed our minds, and started struggling with our local provider to get a wireless connection to our laptop. We haven't had cable or broadcast television in our house for years, yet we are all always watching something on Hulu or Youtube or Netflix Instant Play. In short, while I may play the resolute agrarian/communitarian/populist/localist/radical democrat/quasi-Luddite on the blog, the truth is I'm every bit as divided about the progress of technology as Rod Dreher was when he guiltily admitted his geek-out over the iPad.

3) It was my thoughts about Dreher's predicament, I suspect, that got the attention of Nick Carr's publisher, and ended up with me holding a copy of the book in my hands. A lucky break for me, for while I was familiar with--and tended to agree with--the claims Carr made in his famous Atlantic article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", in truth I might not have ever read the book otherwise, and that would have meant missing out on a marvelous synthesis of neurobiology, textual history, sociology, literary criticism, psychology, and more. The book's arguments are broad, but its overarching thesis is a simple two-pronged one. First, that the internet has an "intellectual ethic," just as every "intellectual technology" does, "a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work" (p. 43). The assumptions at work in and through the internet, as it happens, are ones which revolve around snap judgments, thin generality, shifting attention spans, multitasking, flexibility, and most of all, distractions: the ethic of "the juggler" in other words (p. 112). Second, that in becoming jugglers of information we are actually making it--neurologically, psychologically, structurally--harder and harder for our own brains to do anything otherwise. The "deep reading" made possible by the ethic of the book--the way we could learn to enter into, identify with, creatively work through and embrace or reject a written argument (pp. 71-72)--has a neurological reality to it, and when our brains mold themselves to a different environment of reading, basic cognition, long-term memory, and learning are all dramatically affected, and not in a positive way. On the contrary, we become habituated to viewing all information--literature, science, journalism, scholarship, whatever--as something to be "strip-mined [for] relevant content" (p. 164), and rather than thereby supposedly refining our ability to recognize (in classic marketplace of ideas fashion) good information from bad, in fact our capacity to make learned judgments is physically undermined. Carr quotes neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, who bleakly sums up the research: we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap" (p. 140).

The conclusion towards which Carr's theses point is not that the internet and all the services and toys it makes possible are to be destroyed. Hardly--Carr himself admits "I'm not sure I could live without it" (p. 198). But it does warn us that there is a real reason to slow down and be cautious in our adaption to these tools...which, really, is all that us fuddy-duddy parents (and President Obama too) have been talking all along. Should we reject this advice, the results, Carr thinks, could be very bad. Bad in a human sense, as it may mean the slow loss of the ability of many to "construct within our own minds the...connections that give rise to a singular intelligence" (p. 141), and bad for our culture--all cultures, really--in that it suggests "the replacement of [a] complex inner density with a new kind of self," one bereft of a patiently accumulated heritage of understanding, and replaced by (here Carr quotes the playwright Richard Foreman) "pancake people, spread wide and thin" (p. 194).

4) I also realized that for some people (I'm looking at you, Alan), this all may be old hat, and admittedly Carr sometimes belabors his claims. I'm no student of the technology of reading, but even I--as one for whose college education was much shaped by the looming influence of Martin Heidegger--found myself a little impatient and non-plussed to realize that Carr only gets around to referencing "The Question Concerning Technology" (which is the central challenge to the problematic meaning of our modern relationship with tools) on the very last page of the last chapter of the book (p. 220). But my own philosophical preferences in terms of asking the questions which Carr is asking are mostly irrelevant insofar as the book itself is concerned: someone else might think he spends much too much time on the "plasticity" of the brain, or on the neurobiology of memory; someone else might think that he spends too much time on the invention of the bound volume, and the printing press which made it possible. I can only judge the book as it stands though, and for me, overall, it was revealing, persuasive, and not a little frightening. In regards to that last, Carr does exceptional work, smartly laying the groundwork--both scientific and historical--that helps the reader appreciate the unnerving implications of our rapid, at times manic, movement into the shallow mental world of the internet, and especially the implications of the claims made by those who breezily or should-shruggingly apologize for it. There are several of these, but my favorite--if that's that right word to use--was Clay Shirky, a brilliant salesman for our ever-more interconnected and individualized world, a fellow who has mystified me before. Carr both quotes and deconstructs:

Shirky, a digital-media scholar at New York University, suggested in a 2008 blog post that we shouldn't waste our time mourning the death of deep reading--it was overrated all along. "No one reads War and Peace," he wrote, singling out Tolstoy's epic as the quintessence of high literary achievement. "It's too long, and not so interesting." People have "increasingly decided that Tolstoy's sacred work isn't actually worth the time it takes to read it." The same goes for Proust's In Search of Lost Time and other novels that until recently were considered, in Shirky's cutting phrase, "Very Important in some vague way." Indeed, we've "been emptily praising" writers like Tolstoy and Proust "all these years." Our old literary habits "were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access." Now that the Net has granted us abundant "access," Shirky concludes, we can at last lay those tired habits aside.

Such proclamations...come off as the latest manifestation of the outré posturing that has always characterized the anti-intellectual wing of academia. But...there may be a more charitable explanation.... Shirky, and others like him, may be early exemplars of the post-literary mind, intellectuals for whom the screen rather than the page has always been the primary conduit of information....If you lack the time, the interest, or the facility to inhabit a literary work...then of course you'd consider Tolstoy's masterpiece to be "too long, and not so interesting." Although it may be tempting to ignore those who suggest the value of the literary mind has always been exaggerated, that would be a mistake. Their arguments are another important sign of the fundamental shift taking place in society's attitude towards intellectual achievement. Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift--to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable...Shirky provide[s] the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably into the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life. (pp. 109-110)

5) Finally, it made me think about what I'm doing, and what I could be doing. I'll admit, in addition to sometimes frightening me, the book also sometimes pleased me, because some of what it persuaded me of simply clarified and strengthen my commitment to certain practices which I already prefer. As he presented study after study supporting the argument that most students don't remember what they read off a screen as well as what they read off a printed page, and don't listen as well to a lecture when it is spaced out in the midst of multimedia presentations (pp. 128-129), it made me feel better about being a mostly chalk-on-the-blackboard lecturer, and the fact that I give my students reading assignments from books they can hold and PDF files they can print out. And the fact that--as has been obvious to bloggers for years--web surfers overwhelmingly just don't read what they see online, but merely skim it, on average absorbing perhaps 18% of the verbiage in any given post at most as they hunt for the next hyperlink or interesting nugget of information (pp. 132-133), perversely made me feel good about my exhaustively lengthy blogging habits: no matter whether you write long posts or short, most people just aren't going to read more than the first "two or three lines of text" anyway. (Of course, the shorter and more frequent the posts, the greater the number of (non-)readers will any blog get, and so that's perhaps worth something. Actually, Carr inspired me to do a little blog research, and see how I stacked up in terms of average lengths of post against some of the other blogs on my blogroll. I write longer stuff than most everyone I read regularly--1045 words per post on average--but that's almost the same as Tim Burke--1037 per post--and anything that puts me in Tim's company leaves me happy. Among other individual bloggers: Hugo Schwyzer was 842, Peter Levine 733, Alan Jacobs 397, Jacob Levy 367, and Laura McKenna a speedy 251.)

But of course, the truth is that I'm very much a part of this distracted world as well; I mean, hell, I've just spent four hours online writing this review. Like Carr himself, I've found it becoming difficult to unplug, to focus, and to read deeply. That's probably one of the reasons why, I suppose, I resolved this summer to actually read some books, so as to maintain my own (already weakened from what it once was, I recognize) capacity for attentively engaging with an argument, and thereby exercising and fortifying those parts of my brain which enable me to do so. The Shallows was the first on that long list, and, if nothing else, it was a very good start.