The Shallows

This is sort of a book overview, with emphasis on “sort of”. I am too ignorant on the book’s subject to be a critic, but I can nonetheless connect on a personal level.

It is called The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, a Christmas present from a dear friend. The underling theme is technological determinism, the idea that our technologies are not mere tools of which we are complete masters, but to the contrary, we as individuals and societies tailor our lives around technolgy that pops up. The clock encouraged measurement and organisation, the map abstract thinking, books promoted deep contemplative thought, and now the Internet is also altering our minds too. But the depth and nature of these changes were unforeseeable for even the inventor, they came naturally and irreversibly over time. Interesting.

But I found Carr’s history lesson on books even more interesting, together with their progression into the Internet. Very early writing was hard to read, on scrolls, laid out without spacing or punctuation. It was designed to be read aloud – in fact, a Roman emperor was once astonished when he saw one of his advisors read in silence. Around the birth of Christ, bookmaking came along and it helped popularise the written word, as did improvements in grammar and alphabets. Fast forward to the Middle Ages when scholars, in stark contrast to their ancestors, worked in silent libraries, deep in concentrated thought. With Gutenberg, books become available to the masses and spread contemplative reasoning further than ever.

Let’s pause to make a couple of points. One, Carr, claims that this is quite an unnatural process. We as species have evolved to quickly switch our attention, be aware of the surrounding environment and process multiple tasks. Being lost in thought wouldn’t really be a survival technique in prehistoric times. But, point two, this does bring huge advantages, as demonstrated by the great leaps of science and technology during and following the Industrial revolution.

Now welcome to the 21st century with our latest toy, the Internet. The written word comes in shiny new forms – in 140 character chunks on Twitter, hyperlinked on webpages, available in abundance at a touch of a Google search button. The Internet oversatisfies our curiosity and overburdens us with information. We now quickly skim read and heavily multi-task. This, Carr argues, is an entirely natural process – we were evolutionary made for it – but has it harmed our ability to think deeply? The author argues so. Our short attention span means that we cannot concentrate long and well enough to mimic the work process of an old school scientist. Carr also argues that our reliance on machines leads to weaker memory, which together with our shallower thought process makes us less deep, less empathic, less human.

This is how the book ends. At times it felt very relevant to me as I am concious that I only half-process a lot of information. I am not sure if we are all becoming shallower as Carr says, but I certainly felt like I did. This did annoy me, but it wasn’t until I read this well written, if a bit over-the-top, book that it made me think more consciously about my work flow in particular. To which I’ve now made changes!

Carr believes that the Internet does and will continue to change our brains even off-line. But I’m not too sure about that, because I do enjoy the naturally singular focus of human conversation or book reading, for example. Precisely because they are so off-line and unInternet-like. But in any case, there is a lot to be said about information overload and attention spans, so I recommend this book not only for it encourages us to reflect, but because it’s well written and very well researched.

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