The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

Last weekend I read Nicholas Carr’s book on how the Internet is rotting your brain, The Shallows. The book is at times very interesting–and it’s worth reading for those interesting parts–but it did bring to mind something I read in a Clay Shirky interview at the B&N Review:

I think we will see fewer authors and more writers. There’s this long, long, lonely gap between the 8,000-word New Yorker article and the 80,000-word book. And there are a bunch of interesting things that are about 20,000 words long. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where, if you’re reviewing a nonfiction book, it’s commonplace, if you like it, to assure the readers of the review that this is not just a magazine article inflated to 80,000 words so that it can be sold on the shelves at the bookstore. Which, in a way, is saying there’s a bunch of stuff that actually would be better at 20,000 or 25,000 words than at 80,000 words.

By the evidence of The Shallows, Carr is a writer, but not an author.

By far the most interesting part of The Shallows is chapter 7, wherein Carr synthesizes a robust body of research that attempts to understand the effects of the Internet on the human mind and, particularly, the working of human memory. It’s some frightening stuff, enough to convince me that I should be offline more and should read more articles in a disconnected environment. (Reasonable alternatives would be a printout, a text document stripped of all rich content, or the Kindle, although each iteration of the Kindle seems to be getting busier and busier, which may be good for sales but is probably bad for concentration.)

Chapter 8, which feels like a stray article on Google for some glassy magazine, is also highly interesting. I don’t quite buy Carr’s argument that Google’s raison d’etre represents a 21st-century version of 19th-century Taylorism. However, Carr’s reportage on just how central massive amounts of data are to Google’s business model is fascinating, as well as the statements he has dug up wherein the founders seem to say they aspire to both creating a universal, perfectly searchable information database and artificial intelligence. (The two goals are, in the founders’ minds, not necessarily mutually exclusive.)

Chapter 9, where Carr gives a brief rundown of our current understanding of how memories are physically created in the mind is interesting (particularly if you are like me and find memory an endlessly fascinating topic), but these findings are never meaningfully linked back to Carr’s argument that the Internet is having deleterious effects on our brain chemistry.

Those two (or maybe three) chapters are solid and worth reading, but the rest of the book is very hit and miss. Carr expends a lot of verbiage demonstrating that the mind is highly elastic and that technologies like maps, books, and televisions call all “rewire” it. Fair enough, but the very banality of that fact (which Carr helps goes some way toward demonstrating with his repeated protestations that just about every experience can rewire your brain) undercuts Carr’s big a-ha moment: thus we are all engaged in a social experiment wherein the Internet is rewiring our brains!

Yes, that’s true, but hasn’t it always been so, and won’t it always be so? The Shallows does not devote much space to making a credible case that this massive cognitive oil change is substantially different than the one we underwent when literacy became widespread. Yes, Carr does mount an argument for why mass literacy was a “good” rewiring, whereas the Internet is a “bad” rewiring, but it’s a little milquetoast.

The fact is that the narrative expressed in The Shallows lacks much vision or gravity. There is too much argument like this:

What is different, and troubling, [now] is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for deeper study, scanning is becoming an end in itself–our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts. We’ve reached the point where a Rhodes Scholar like Florida State’s Joe O’Shea–a philosophy major no less–is comfortable admitting not only that he doesn’t read books but that he doesn’t see any particular need to read them.

If you try searching The Shallows for proof of the claim that scanning is now “our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts,” you will do so in vain, other than to find that some Rhodes Scholar is anti-book.

The Shallows is full of unconvincing claims such as that. I am simply not convinced that we’ve exchanged book-style reading for Internet-style reading, and nor am I convinced that such an exchange is as pivotal as Carr wants to argue. Maybe in Carr’s mind that is the case (he includes an epilogue where he writes, without irony, about how he had to move into the woods away from the Internet just to be able to complete writing The Shallows). But, 1) I don’t think the change is near as pivotal as Carr asserts, and 2) certainly there are other major historic trends that must be taken into account in addition to the shift from books to Internet.

After reading The Shallows, I have to say that I think I’d like Nicholas Carr as a person. He certainly means well in writing this book, and he comes across as sincere. I share his fears of a world that may one day skim more than read, and I’d say we’re both fighting for the same side. To the extent that The Shallows will help convince Internet junkies and iPhone tweakers to put down their devices for a while, it is probably a good thing. But it remains a deeply dissatisfying book on a topic that is still awaiting someone who can truly interpret it for us.

Links

Clay Shirky interview

Taylorism

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