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4 out of 5
by
Kenneth
from
Saint Louis, MO | Jun 18, 2010
Nicholas Carr's The Shallows is a book worthy of our attention. His important questions about the ubiquity of Internet use (How is the way we read changing? How is the way we write changing? How is the way we think changing?) deserve our reflection, and even if you disagree with Carr's conclusions (Is Carr a Luddite alarmist?) his thesis will give you much to mull over.
Carr's book is a welcome addition to the current dialogue about how technology shapes our lives--for better and for worse. (An earlier, more thought-provoking book on the subject is Barry Sanders' The Private Death of Public Discourse.) I, for one, am often amazed by how new technology is rarely questioned but rather quickly and completely embraced (for example, cellphones!), and I wonder to what degree Carr's book might have benefited by a discussion of consumerism as well as the trappings of Capitalism.
5 people found this review helpful
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5 out of 5
by
Will
from
Brooklyn, NY | Jul 13, 2010
In this fascinating, informative book, Carr argues that the internet has not only affected how society communicates and works, but that how our actual brains work is being, has been changed by contemporary modes of communication. He delves into the history of research into brain function to make a case that similar biological changes occurred with prior technological breakthroughs, such as the typewriter. He cites a wealth of studies that dispel the notion of the brain as set in stone once adulthood is reached. The brain is plastic. All our neural circuitry can be modified, and it adapts to each new technology, not with slow genetic modification, but using inherent neurological plasticity to function in new ways.
Next he follows the trail of language from cuneiform through wax tablets to papyrus, and actual pages, from Gutenberg to today, from the radio to television, from Turing to the iPhone. It is a fast-paced and information-rich journey.
The big guns come out in chapter 7, The Juggler’s Brain, where Carr argues forcefully that the medium of the internet is, by design, an engine of distraction, and it has changed how we read and how we think. The change may have some benefits, but the cost is quite high, particularly in reducing our ability to think reflectively. I found this chapter particularly compelling.
A later chapter reports on Google’s megalomaniacal plan to put all books in human history into a single database that Google will control. All that’s lacking is a smug, pinkie-ringed fat guy sitting in his secret lair stroking a fluffy white cat.
Chapter nine takes on the mechanistic view of the human brain as a sort of computer. In particular Carr takes issue with the view of long-term memory as being the equivalent of a hard drive, used solely to hold information. It turns out that, unlike the on-off character of digital memory, human memory is not so absolute. Information, observation and experience go through several steps before finding their way to long term memory, and even when a memory or bit of information is recalled, it finds its way back into long-term memory with the added color and texture of the time and circumstances of its recollection. This is fascinating stuff, but I think he goes a bit too far in his dismissal of the computer as a model for human brainworks. Consider that he fully embraces a concept of “working memory” as a temporary workplace in which new memory is mixed with retrieved memory to constitute the bulk of what we consider active consciousness. The similarity to RAM is just too obvious to ignore.
Quibble aside, this is a riveting and informative tale, with obvious implications for our culture, that is, if you can pay attention to reading it long enough for the lessons to sink in.
Some quotes:
P 6
As McLuhan suggested, media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my [Carr’s:] capacity for concentration and contemplation.
P 115 – As revolutionary as it may be, the Net is best understood as the latest in a long series of tools that have helped mold the human mind.
P 140 – Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively. “Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no,” says Grafman. “The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.” You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.
1 people found this review helpful
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5 out of 5
by
Mike
from
Sacramento, CA | Aug 25, 2010
As I said to a couple of friends this morning, this may be the most influential book I have read in the last five years. That doesn't mean it is the most interesting or an ideal of great writing. What Carr has to say needs to be known - and no one has said it better than he.
Carr owes much to Marshall McLuhan, who noticed that the way people think changes as technology changes. Carr takes McLuhan's famous observation back to its roots, exploring the origins of writing and books, pausing to consider the debate between Socrates and Plato on the subject, drawing the line up to the present emergence of the Internet and social media.
Carr asks the critical question: What is happening to our brains as the Internet becomes a dominant force in our daily lives? His answers are at the very least disturbing - and at their extreme, terrifying. Let me just acknowledge two of his best points.
First, he documents how today's generation has become enthralled in short-term memory while we quickly lose the ability and tendency to store long-term memories. Perhaps the hardest part of reading this book is wading through the many studies he quotes which prove each point he makes. But the wading will bring you to a very rocky shore. Today's human, in the grasp of information technology, can no longer store what is valuable and discern what is trivial. He remarks that readers used to be able to "scuba dive into the depths of a book's truths. Now, with the Internet, we just skim along the top of ideas on jet-skis."
Second, he notices how all of us have become unable to maintain our attention on a subject for longer than a few minutes. Because of this, we can't do "deep-thinking", a Carr word for meditation or reflection.
Read to the very end for his formula to address these changes.
What I love is hearing his first step to getting over his brain changes. He moved from Boston to Colorado in order to have time, space and thinking room to get the book done. Well done, Mr. Carr.
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3 out of 5
by
Kate
from
Denver, CO | Aug 16, 2010
It's not just my imagination that heavy internet use, despite its advantages of broad scope, quick fact-finding, and easy networking, leads to superficial understanding and distracted living. Carr brings forward study after study showing that reading online leads to impaired comprehension as compared to reading straightforward linear text; for example, hyperlinks, once predicted to deepen and broaden our grasp of a subject, have repeatedly been shown to hamper it. He considers in detail how different media affect the brain's ability to acquire, store and interpret knowledge. I especially enjoyed his description of the development of the book. He shows that skimming, a valuable and practical skill we formerly used to choose what to read in depth, is now all we do--we skim countless articles and blogs, barely remember anything we read, and do virtually no in-depth reading at all. This actually physically changes our brains, strengthening our ability to pick out key words and multitask, but weakening our ability to think deeply and critically.
The author is calm and balanced in presenting and commenting on the research, being careful not to make his book a rant. One wonders where all this internet-fueled distraction will lead . . .
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5 out of 5
by
Tom
from
London, ON, Canada | Aug 15, 2010
This book presents compelling arguments around the contention that the widespread and increasing reliance on the digital world is altering the way that we think, or whether we cease to think altogether. While this idea is not new, I was impressed with the detailed literature review that he mustered to support his points. In the end one is left with a concern for what we have given up, though to some extent he tries to present some balance by quoting those who contend that the advent of the digital revolution is another force to which humans will adapt. Quoted are many studies that detail the ways in which by outsourcing our memories, our cognitive capabilities decline. One question that arises in my mind is whether the studies quoted only used people not raised on computers i.e. digital immigrants, rather than those for whom these devices are the way they exist in the world i.e. digital natives. Nevertheless, the fact remains that our brains are changed by the tools that we use, and further that as our brains change, so do the tools in a kind of co-evolution. The book is definitely worth a second reading and reflection.
There are four categories of technologies: those that extend our physical strength (the plow, the darning needle, the fighter jet), those that extend the sensitivity of our senses (the microscope, the telescope), those that reshape nature to better serve our needs or desires (the reservoir, the birth control pill, genetically modified corn), those that extend or support our mental powers (typewriter, abacus, slide rule, books, newspapers, school). The last are called intellectual technologies and they have the greatest power over what and how we think. “An intellectual technology becomes an indispensable component of any structure once it is so thoroughly integrated with the structure so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure.’
Every intellectual technology embodies an intellectual ethic, a set ofassumptions about how the human mind works or should work.
Technological determinism: technological progress is seen as an autonomous force outside man’s control and is a primary factor influencing the course of human history. At the other end of the spectrum are the instrumentalists who downplay the power of technology which is seen as a neutral artifact. “our instruments are the means we use to achieve our ends; they have no ends of their own.” The technologies that restructure language tend to have the strongest influence over our intellectual lives.
Reading on the computer fosters an ‘ecology of interruption’ making deep reading (that which is done in quiet reflection without interruption) increasingly rare and may portend a time when such reading is simply an ‘arcane hobby’ practiced by a few.
Memory researchers distinguish between short term memory, working memory and long term memory. We normally can hold only a limited number of thoughts in our working memory, but for any memory to be transposed into long term memory (i.e. learned), it must first go through working memory (this takes place in the hippocampus). Working memory is therefore a bottleneck in learning and if we occupy it with too many thoughts, it inhibits the learning process. On average, people spend only 10 seconds looking at a web page before getting distracted. When subjects read text with hyperlinks it took longer and less was retained than when the same text was written as a page or book without the hyperlinks.
“we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.”
Cognitive skills that are enhanced by the use of computers and the Net are lower level or more primitive mental functions such as hand-eye coordination, reflex response, and the processing of visual cures. There is some evidence that such work may lead to a small expansion in the capacity of our working memory. However, what we are doing when we multitask is learning to be skillful at a superficial level.
“each of us carries and projects the history of the future. Culture is sustained in our synapses.”
“Whenever we use a tool to exert greater control over the outside world, we change our relationship with that world.”
“We program our computers and thereafter they program us.”
“..the tide of technological revolution could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” Heidegger in the 1950’s