We’ve heard this just about everywhere. It’s in newspapers and magazines. Our parents talk about it, and even we talk about it too. The internet is changing how we think, and possibly in more negative ways than positive ones.
Being the young tech-savvy generation born into this world, we may just dismiss these claims as simple paranoia adults have for an ever-increasing generation gap. But can some of it be true? Can it really be happening?
Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows, provides a sometimes funny, sometimes personal, but always informative view into how the internet fits in the history of technology and communication, and, more importantly, how it changes our brains.
The book starts by introducing the simple problem of the internet age, illustrating it through confessions of professional writers, intellectuals and award-winning college students. Even though they all use the internet for different purposes and have different opinions about it, they all complain about one thing: they cannot keep their minds off that enticing hypertext, those quick and easy Google searches waiting to be explored. Some even can’t read more than three paragraphs without wanting to skip to the next blog.
From this problem, Carr enters, one by one, into different forays in which the internet has left its mark. He touches on brain development, showing us how amazingly adaptable our brains really are, even well beyond childhood. He touches on technological history, tracking the histories of age-old instruments like the clock, and how each new technology forces us to think differently. He even goes into the history of language and writing. The problem of changing communication has been around since the advent of writing itself. Even the wisest of the wise Socrates questioned writing as “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder”, believing that writing would corrupt the art of thinking and memory.
Carr provides interesting insights into modern developments as well. Take e-books for example. Although e-books have grown increasingly popular, anecdotes from readers and professional writers show that e-books have made the traditional one-track reading more difficult. Features like social networking and hyperlinked words infuse the written word with the distractions of the internet technology. Scientific case studies actually have shown that print material readers remember far more than online readers when give the same text. Online readers don’t read anymore, but skim.
This book is spotted with fun factoid “digressions”, as the author calls them. Some are Carr’s personal recounting on his internet experience. I do confess that these aren’t very relevant to the main discussion of the book, but the ones that do are rather thought-provoking. For example, PSAT scores have actually dropped on average since 1999, where reading dropped 6.9% and writing, 3.3%.
This book sometimes does seem like a book directed toward a less online-experienced reader. We probably know how Facebook notifications work or how distracting Facebook and Twitter can be. This book may seem biased, especially to those passionate tech advocates. But this book nevertheless will entertain and make us rethink just how serious the effects of the internet really are.
