Nicholas G. Carr

Expanding on an article that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the best-selling author of The Big Switch discusses the intellectual and cultural consequences of the Internet, and how it may be transforming our neural pathways for the worse.

What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

The Shallows

Nicholas Carr

Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”—Michael Agger, Slate “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Nick Gracilla

This book is in my top three reads of the year. It takes the reader on a journey through intellectual technology—from an oral history to early writing, through the inventions of scrolls, manuscripts, and books, to databases to the Internet today. On a parallel track, it investigates the structure and nature of our brains—how working memory, long-term memory, and neuro-elasticity function, and the roles that attention, deep focus, immersion, and distraction play. It’s not a pretty picture: most of the Net has optimized towards the selling and distributing of ads, which require our constant distraction and inattention—and it has a physical, neuronal outcome in our brains and working patterns. The good news? Elasticity implies it can be reversed. 

I was left asking new questions: what does it mean to use our technology mindfully? Why is it so important? What can we gain by doing so? And how can we be the driver of our own thinking processes?

Nelson Zagalo

a minha análise: http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...

Garrett Jansen

Overall, it's okay and I find it making some compelling arguments for the shift in thinking that's been enforced by more technology but it spends more time centering on the medium rather than the way that it's been used. If the issue is truly overstimulation, we can find ways to reel back the stimulation while still maintaining the benefits of tech. Along with missing that significant distinction, it feels a bit out of date. That's solely the result of tech being a moving target that's easy to miss and the book being over a decade old at this point. Perhaps it's a testament to its presience but I'd probably say you should spend more time reading "Irresistible" by Adam Alter. If you find yourself still wanting more on the ethics and impact of tech, this is certainly worth the while but not something I'd recommend as a top-level view.

Nadine 

This is one of those books (like lean in) that is so often quoted and written about that you feel you don’t need to read it because you already know it. But when you do you realise it’s so much more than the headlines and sound bites attributed to it. 
I won’t rehash what it’s about merely say it’s worth reading and you can skim over the stuff you’ve read elsewhere or by someone else or the (now 4 years later) stuff that’s become dated or obsolete.

Magdalene Lim

For a book that says the internet is making us shallow by changing the way we process things and is making us all easily distracted, way to go by filling the first part of the book with dry information about how the brain works, synapses and stuff! I almost felt like I couldn't continue reading the book at certain points, but continued cos I didn't want the author to prove his point. Ha ha.

"The map and the clock shared a similar ethic. Both placed a new stress on measurement and abstraction, on perceiving and defining forms and processes beyond those apparent to our senses."

The most interesting takeaway I got from this book was how our tools molds our minds and the way we think, on a far greater scale than we can imagine. Because we rely so much on the internet "as an extension of our memory" cos we can retrieve information so easily, we archive our information sources rather than store information.

Bryan C

'Boldly reactionary... What looks like feast, Carr argues, may be closer to famine' Sunday Times 'Chilling' The Economist In this ground-breaking and compelling book, Nicholas Carr argues that not since Gutenberg invented printing has humanity been exposed to such a mind-altering technology. The Shallows draws on the latest research to show that the Net is literally re-wiring our brains inducing only superficial understanding. As a consequence there are profound changes in the way we live and communicate, remember and socialise - even in our very conception of ourselves. By moving from the depths of thought to the shallows of distraction, the web, it seems, is actually fostering ignorance. The Shallows is not a manifesto for luddites, nor does it seek to turn back the clock. Rather it is a revelatory reminder of how far the Internet has become enmeshed in our daily existence and is affecting the way we think. This landmark book compels us all to look anew at our dependence on this all-pervasive technology. This 10th-anniversary edition includes a new afterword that brings the story up to date, with a deep examination of the cognitive and behavioural effects of smartphones and social media.

The Shallows What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

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