New West Book Review

Distracted: This Is Your Brain on the Internet

By Jenny Shank, 7-05-10

The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing To Our Brains
by Nicholas Carr
W.W. Norton, 276 pages, $26.95

Chances are, even though you’ve navigated over to this web page, you’re not actually reading this sentence.  You’ve landed here momentarily, probably because Google’s all-knowing algorithm sent you here.  Your eyes are darting across this web page in an F-shaped pattern, and even if this review happens to interests you, you’ll only read about 18 percent of it. 

My time with you is brief: fewer than one in ten page views lasts longer than two minutes.  And because of people’s impaired ability to transfer information gleaned from “power-browsing” from short-term into long-term memory, you won’t remember any of this in the morning.  This is the news that Boulder-based writer Nicholas Carr brings in The Shallows, a thoughtful book that invites us to reflect on how our lives, attention spans, and brains have changed over the past heady decade of rapid adoption of constant use of the Internet.

I am somewhat old-school in my media habits—I read a book or so a week and I regularly read a printed newspaper.  But when I couldn’t find a passage I was looking for in the index of The Shallows just now, I clicked over to Amazon and used their “Search Inside the Book” feature to find the sentence in seconds.  I, like anybody else, check my email too often, and sometimes this feels like compulsive behavior. 

Perhaps because I still read printed books so regularly, I don’t feel, like Carr does, that it’s no longer “easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article.” But I do feel distracted, over-extended in terms of how much media there is to consume, and many people I talk to report this feeling—that they can’t read or write long pieces of prose anymore.  As Carr puts it, “My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.”

Search engines are efficient, and connecting with old friends and making new ones through email, Facebook, and Twitter is often gratifying.  Nicholas Carr agrees with this.  Some might expect a book with a title like The Shallows to be a polemic against all use of the Internet, but it certainly isn’t that.  It’s an invitation for the reader to pause and reflect—in a world of very little pausing and reflection—about how the Internet has changed the very structure of our brains.  The many studies Carr cites demonstrate that the brain is a plastic organ that rapidly evolves in response to the stimulus we give it.  “The computer…is so much our servant,” Carr writes, “that it would seem churlish to notice that it is also our master.”

That’s the paradox of the benefits and the detriments of using the Internet, as Carr observes: “The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others.  It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”

Carr explores the advent of the Internet from a variety of angles: its historical place in the line of communication devices humans have used since Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1450, the way interaction with it manipulates us psychologically, and what its influence does to erode the qualities that many agree are what make us recognizably human: deep thought, empathy, attentiveness, and memory, among others. 

Carr makes a convincing case that our brains are evolving in response to the constant exposure we give them to the Internet—some people are connected most of their waking hours.  Because there are so many distractions online, different parts of the brain are used to read a digital text than are used to read a printed book.  “What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense,” Carr writes, “a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.”

Carr doesn’t recommend specific actions people take in response to this data, but he seems to suggest that we each make an individual choice to consciously decide how we are spending our time, what we are attending to, and what we want our brains to be.  If we want to be able to engage in contemplative or critical thinking, than we have to practice these eroding skills.  The worst thing, in Carr’s view, would be to go along with everybody else is doing without questioning it, keeping plugged in and on alert at all times until our memory is shot and we have lost our abilities to reflect, as though we don’t have a choice.

To regain enough of his reflective abilities to be able to write this book, Carr moved from Boston to an area in the mountains near Boulder with “no cell phone service” and Internet access through “a relatively poky DSL connection.” Carr turned off his email and shut down his browser when he wanted to use his computer just for typing.  He discusses research that suggests spending time in nature allows our inner faculties of contemplation to return.  Carr writes, “A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition.  Their brains become both calmer and sharper.”

Carr cites several studies that demonstrate that literary and newspaper reading continue to diminish.  He doesn’t think reading will extinguish entirely—there is always a group of people who continue to use an old technology.  But given the distracting nature of wired-up city life, the last bastion of readers just might be in rural areas so often overlooked as a potential audience for books.

Nicholas Carr will discuss The Shallows at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on Wednesday, July 7 at 7:30 p.m.

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