(in particular, it builds upon The Big Switch’s last chapter, "iGod". Nicholas Carr’s main argument in The Atlantic essay is that the Internet might have detrimental effects on cognition, i.e. the internet diminishes the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Despite the title, the article is not singling out Google, but is more a critique of the technological utopianism, surrounded by the fervor of the latest and greatest technological fad, be that Web 2.0 technologies, social media, etc. Nicholas Carr builds on these threads further, in his latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
, published in June 2010.“You want access to as much information as possible so you can discern what is most relevant and correct. The solution isn’t to limit the information you receive. Ultimately you have to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind.”
- Google co-founder, Sergey Brin; in a 2004 interview with Playboy Magazine
"I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. My brain wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it."
- Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
The Effects of the Internet and Its Technologies on Reading Behaviors: Nicholas Carr asserts that using the Internet can lead to a lower attention span, and can make it more difficult to read in the traditional sense (that is, read a book at length without mental interruptions). Nicholas Carr says that he and his friends have found it more difficult to concentrate and read whole books, even though they read a great deal when they were younger (that is, when they did not have access to the Internet). Researchers from the University College London have done a 5-year study on Internet habits, and have found that people using websites on a regular basis exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.
"It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense."
- University College London, School of Life and Medical Sciences
"But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become "pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button."
- Richard Foreman, March 2005
In June 2010, Jonah Lehrer wrote “Our Cluttered Minds” for The New York Times. While Nicholas Carr tries to ground his argument in the details of modern neuroscience, his most powerful points have nothing do with our plastic cortex. Instead, “The Shallows
” is most successful when Nicholas Carr sticks to cultural criticism, as he documents the losses that accompany the arrival of new technologies. The rise of the written text led to the decline of oral poetry; the invention of movable type wiped out the market for illuminated manuscripts; the television show obliterated the radio play (if hardly radio itself). Similarly, numerous surveys suggest that the Internet has diminished our interest in reading books. Carr quotes Wallace Stevens’s poem “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” in which stillness allows the reader to “become a book.” The incessant noise of the Internet, Nicholas concludes, has turned the difficult text into an obsolete relic."In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us."
- Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
"Thought will spread across the world with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood. It will blanket the earth from one pole to the other — sudden, instantaneous, burning with the fervor of the soul from which it burst forth. This will be the reign of the human word in all its plenitude. Thought will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book — the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a newspaper."
- French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine, 1831, on the proliferation of the burgeoning medium of the day, the newspaper
In September 2010, Steven Poole criticized the Nicholas Carr book, The Shallows
: Like the majority of contemporary books, then, The Shallows does not justify its length: its natural form was always that of a pithy provocation, so as an argument for the superiority of book-length prose it is rather self-defeating. Sometimes, however, it does seem as though the author's memory really has been degraded by his internet abuse. "It's possible to think deeply while surfing the net," Carr admits on page 116, thus momentarily torpedoing the determinism on which his jeremiad is predicated, before he gets back on message a mere three pages later, accusing the net of "preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively". Well, both cannot be true. Either you can think deeply when using the internet, or the internet prevents you from doing so. It is easy to see which version is correct; and which version, conversely, makes for a more polemically enticing sales pitch. All too rarely do defenders of books (and, for that matter, newspapers) ask themselves the uncomfortable question: might it be that people are reading fewer of the products not because people are becoming more stupid but because many of the products are not actually very good?| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Nicholas Carr | ||||
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“The better we get at multitasking, the worse we get at critical thinking”
- Nicholas Carr tells Stephen Colbert
“Shallowness, isn’t that a judgment call?”
- Stephen Colbert asks Nicholas Carr about the wording of the title of his book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
"In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably into the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life."
- Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
In July 2008, Clay Shirky, digital-media scholar at New York University, wrote “Why Abundance is Good: a Reply to Nick Carr.” Despite the sweep of the title, it’s focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life. You can see this in Carr’s polling of “literary types,” in his quoting of Wolf and the playwright Richard Foreman, and in the reference to War and Peace, the only work mentioned by name. Now War and Peace isn’t just any piece of writing, of course; it is one of the longest novels in the canon, and symbolizes the height of literary ambition and of readerly devotion. But here’s the thing: it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting. This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream. Much of the current concern about the internet, in fact, is a misdirected complaint about television, which displaced books as the essential medium by the 1970s.
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