The Shallows

While reading through The Shallows, I'd sometimes catch myself just glossing over the text, distracted by some stray thought that somehow hijacked my attention.

"Oh heck," I'd react, fully aware of the irony. Such inability to focus is precisely evidence of what author Nicholas Carr attempts to argue in his book.

In a sense, there's nothing in The Shallows about how the Internet is affecting our brains that we don't already know. We know we're outsourcing memorization in favor of looking things up online. We know we're easily distracted and have become more impatient with anything slow or lengthy that we encounter on the Web . We know we've become increasingly addicted to our emails, feeds, IMs and status message. We know, in short that somehow the Internet is making us, well, shallow.

Yet The Shallows isn't your typical book about how de Interwebz are making us stoopid. Quite the opposite, in fact: Carr offers a holistic discussion on the subject based on both empirical findings and intelligent social commentary. The book's principal argument is first framed around the concept of neuroplasticity (i.e. how the brain can rewire itself), woven into a historical account of the democratization of knowledge occasioned by the Gutenberg press, and peppered throughout with research about how the Internet is simply not suited to deep reading. By the end of it all, The Shallows provides a more substantial account, again, of what we seem to know but have seldom articulated: that the Internet has a deleterious effect on our minds.

Some have scored Carr for neglecting to give due consideration to literature that elaborate on the positive effects that technology (in general) and the Internet (in particular) can have on human cognition. Personally, I don't take as much issue with this as Carr is certainly entitled to argue the negative. Instead, my qualm is with how The Shallows muddles the issue that just because the Internet can make us dumber it necessarily must be so. That's an important distinction, and one that Carr explains away (wrongly, I would think) by asserting that human adaptability is at best neutral. Ultimately, what The Shallows illustrates is that the way the Internet is put to use by most people these days can be a step backward rather than forward. But who is to say that we will keep using the Internet as we use it today, or that we'll never find the optimal way to put it to work for us?

Or did I miss the point, already irreparably damaged by the Internet so as to be distracted by fleeting conjecture? Who can say for sure? In the end, this is why The Shallows, at its core, is such intelligent and compelling material: by arguing the point that the Internet is making us stupid, we become better equipped to mitigate our online excesses -- and hopefully come out smarter in the process.