Getting Deeper into the Internet is Rather... Shallow...
A review of the book "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr
Hey everyone, it’s Matt from Forensics with Matt and I will speak on a book that I read which is relevant to all of us here in this modern world. This book is called The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. It is a relatively short read, just over 200 pages. However, it is a very information-dense sett of pages. Let us begin breaking it down.
The Cover
When looking at the main cover, the first time I saw it, I thought that the main title should be more prominent than it is. Then I read the subtitle and noticed the style from both of the titles. I thought that it was neat that the designer made it like shallow water. That’s a genius way to lead us into the content of the shallowness of the internet. There is also a case to be made for The Shallows meaning more of the surface-level stuff. There is evidence for this distinction not only in the text, but also in the titles of the book in other languages. Here is the Spanish version, which is titled Superficiales, from the Spanish word superficie, meaning surface.
The Content
The content of the book is very simple. It lays out how the internet affects our brains. It compares the internet to books and also talks alot about the function of the brain and how that plays into our use of the internet. There are a few major topics that this book covers in its body:
Nick’s experience with the internet
History of the written word
Neuroplasticity, focus and distraction
The then-modern state of the internet and how internet companies want to exploit the human brain.
This list of content is not necessarily done in a linear fashion. Nick jumps around between the few. For instance, Nick could be going on about the internet and how it is very distracting and then back up some of his claims with a study author in neuroplasticity. He did something similar a few times. I quite liked how Nick composed this book and how he did a great deal of info related to his point that the Internet is not good for the brain
Nick’s Experience
Carr explains that in his childhood and teen years, he was in the analogue frame of reference and then when he went off to college, he had access to a computer. This means that he had many years to form memories, focus and do things without the digital technology we use today. Nick says that he was enamored by the early computers that he saw and used at Dartmouth. He was so enamored that he invested in computers after he graduated from school. It was an OG Mac.
He testified that over the years, as the internet came on the scene and as it grew, he enthusiastically embraced things like RSS feeds, Twitter, MySpace and other parts of the then new Internet days. This more chaotic internet was radically different than the self-contained, single-task, computer workflows of his Dartmouth days.
This whole bit of his experience and reason for writing this book was a great way to start the book. This is so because it gives a frame of reference for where the nonfiction writer is coming from and why he’s doing it. This leads us to our next point, the aspects of our tools do for us.
Our Tools and What They Do to Us
A big point made within the book is the tradeoffs made when we choose to make a tool. The internet over books, for instance, is no different than the age old new tech atrophying old skills. On this topic, one thing that I found interesting is that he referred back to old Greek philosophers for this. He, on many occasions, referred to how Plato noted that “writing will take away our ability to memorize well in the oral tradition.” Writing things down, in fact, did this to us.
Although writing things down ended the oral tradition of Plato’s day, it did more good things for us. Writing is what allows us to share ideas like this and what allows us to read long-form stories arguments in books. Writing also allowed us to pass on our ideas for many years longer than a human life without relying memory—it’s why I can read Plato’s writings, the Bible, the Qur’an, Ben Franklin’s journals, mid-eighteenth century philosophy or anything else I would want to read.
If we are to read a book in the most effective way, the book will have most of our attention. The task of transferring the information to our brains for analysis and memory will not be interrupted (at least I hope so) by other outside happenings. However, Carr notes that the internet does something different. He notes that our attention is “fragmented by the internet [with all of its hyperlinks and other things]” and that our brains are “overwhelmed by everything [on the internet].” The natural state of the internet is one of constant distraction, with all of the tabs, page contents, ads and other elements. In addition, our computers and phones have alot more distractions on them other than the distractions other than those in the browser.
Overall, I thought Carr’s analysis of how our tools affect us was intriguing and insightful. One of my favorite points he made a comment about the tradeoffs of tools later in the book, “Farmers, similarly, lost some of their feel for the soil when they began using mechanical harrows and plows. Today’s industrial farm worker, sitting in his air-conditioned cage atop a gargantuan tractor, rarely touches the soil at all—though in a single day he can till a field that his hoe-wielding forebear could not have turned in a month. When we’re behind the wheel of our car, we can go a far greater distance than we could cover on foot, but we lose the walker’s intimate connection to the land.” This point really highlights the fact that our technology has a profound effect on our ability to do things (and those things will be done very differently). Carr also has a section where he talks about the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s typewriter. Carr noted that Nietzsche’s writing style changed as he used the typewriter.
Based on these points on Nietzche and the farmer, we can make one big conclusion, similar to what Carr notes in his book, that when we use a tool, we confirm to the limitations of the tool and it becomes and extension of us. With writing, we are able to express even the deepest of thoughts, but there are many things one needs to see to understand. Same with the farmer, a farmer could use a regular hoe and find that he is able to have an idea of how rough the soil is or how hard he needs to push to get a certain depth of irrigation. With a tractor, he could press a button and get the correct depth right away, without having to learn how to do it himself.
With that let’s move on to neuroplasticity. I will explain that and then add in a another section about tools.
Neuroplasticity
What is neuroplasticity?
Neuroplasticity, derived from neuro (relating to the brain, and plastic, the ability to permanently change in form) is the property of the brain that allows it to change and adapt to our environments and the stimuli within them. Our brains are always changing, whether this change is good or bad.
Neuroplasticity in Context
Throughout this book, Carr notes the importance of neuroplasticity to us all. Being the plastic, the brain’s structure will change based on how it’s used. This means that a person used to focusing for large amounts of time, say on a book will be more adept at that. Their brains will literally build its internal circuits to support the person on that task.It can do this for any task. When we want to do deep thinking or deep focus, he stresses that it would be very problematic to spend more time doing activities that require shallow thinking and may lead to distracted thinking, like using the internet.
To this end, Carr cites studies from Michael Merzenich and Gary Small. These studies each brought up points about the Internet being harmful to focus. Mezenich’s studies have the underlying notion that every moment of our day, we are building our brains for whatever we do.If we want to focus, we have to be focusing. If we predominantly use the internet, we will be training our brain to be distracted and process information quickly. Small’s research adds to this point by saying that using the internet just a few hours a day activates more neurons in the parts of the brain that deal with short-term memory and decision-making. I can see how this is so. I have seen, first hand, over the years, that browsers have more going on in them than we may be built for. There are many buttons. In addition to the buttons, there are often many links and one can open many tabs and can even switch between them. All of this makes for a much more frantic workload than just having a book or just pencil and paper.
In addition to this, Carr notes a few studies, like those of Jakob Nielsen, that analyzed the impact that hyperlinks have on comprehension. The results of these studies were profound. They showed that, “People who read text studded with links […], comprehend less than those who read traditional linear text. Even clicking on a hyperlink, it seems, can impair comprehension.” This is immensely helpful to the case of digital distraction being rampant with the internet. One cannot effectively comprehend while distracted; people must be in a focused state to effectively comprehend and retain information in their minds. The natural state of the web is that, “[When we read on the Web,] we’re often distracted by the many opportunities to click away. Each link, each image, each video or animation, represents a moment of decision—a cognitive load that hampers comprehension.” As of recently, after reading the first few chapters of the book, I have even noticed myself getting a small twinge of anxiety when reading an article with hyperlinks. Should I click this link to see what there is on the other side? Is a question that probably goes on in one’s head, and goes on in mine as well.
So, really, the lesson here is that we must pay attention. No pun intended. We must keep an eye on how frantic the pace of our digital lifestyles when it comes to the internet. We should also spend more time focusing by reading books on an e-reader or (preferably) a physical book. If we do not use it, we will lose it!
More Tools: AI and Machine Algorithms
Artificial intelligence and the outsourcing of our intelligence skills to computers is another issue addressed in this book. Carr makes many points about human thinking in his book. He takes the stand of we should not rely heavily on the use of computers and the internet because they hinder our ability to think and do every task under the sun. Throughout the book, he hits this point from many different angles.
Carr mentioned Taylorism in a few sections of the book. He related this system of scientific management from its early days up until now (well, then because this book is around 15 years old). It was all about efficiency. Essentially, the managers, under Taylorism, would strive for efficiency by thorough assessment of factory analytics and acting upon the analytics by changing the layouts and processes to be more efficient. Carr argues that Google is the next iteration of Taylorism: Taylorism of the mind. He says this because Google allows us to break down thinking into searchable, indexable pieces of data, that it emphasizes speed, efficiency, and productivity over depth and contemplation and it designs systems (like search and autocomplete) that steer users away from slow, deliberate thought. The premises of this argument are sound and, in the collective experience, Google does this. It helps us be more efficient in finding information, at the cost of our focus on parsing arguments and getting the larger context of single points.
I hit on this point but, previously, with books and other media, we were forced to sit with them for long periods of time to understand and appreciate them. According to the extension of Carr’s argument, we may no longer be able to do this well. Since we are so used to the internet, our brains are adapted to the distraction that comes with it and its efficiency, we have a hard time sifting through linear media like books and putting to work the slow process of comprehension. The search algorithms of Google, according to Carr, “strip-mine […] relevant content” to make finding relevant data easier. This is contrary to the methods of the past.
Conclusion
The Shallows, By Nicholas Carr, is an exposé on the effects that the internet has on us. Through comparing it with all previous mediums of information transfer, Carr makes the point that the more distraction you have, the more opportunities you have to lose the ability to focus and this lack of focus does great damage to our abilities to make meanings of what we do and get work done effectively. He supports this by telling stories about history, referring to studies on brain function and neuroplasticity, and calling on the experiences of different people to solidify his point that using the internet, with all of its distractions may not be the best idea in the long term. Or at least to change the ways that we decide to use the internet.
Ultimately, in my mind, the argument in this book makes some very good connections with the message given in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman. Although Postman’s work is almost twenty years older than Carr’s work Carr’s work is the extension of this. It is like a spiritual successor in the sense that it fits very well into the frame of reference of our modern technology does look cool and does cool things for us, but it can have some serious side effects on us compared to how we would have been in the past.In other words, if Postman were to have made another book and read Carr’s work for this book, this material may have been a part of it.
This was a very fascinating book, especially with its descriptions of neuroplasticity research, the conversation about how our tools effect us, and, of course the talk about the studies on the internet. It provided insights on what’s going on in our brains while we are using the internet and it left me with a good view of history and how books shaped the past few centuries too.
If you like history, want to learn about the brain, are interested in research about the internet, or just want a good nonfiction that is relevant to technology, I can safely recommend this to you. It is a particularly good book to add to your library if you’re interested in digital minimalism and questioning the super high-tech world we live in today.
I hope that you enjoyed this book review of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. If you did, feel free to subscribe and share with your friends. Until next time, this has been Matt of Forensics With Matt, talking about tech and the way it affects us, Matt OUT!