The Shallows – What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains - Hardcover

Carr, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393072223 ISBN 13: 9780393072228

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Synopsis

The best-selling author of The Big Switch returns with an explosive look at technology’s effect on the mind. “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.

About this title

Review

Nicholas Carr has written an important and timely book. See if you can stay off the web long enough to read it!--Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change

The core of education is this: developing the capacity to concentrate. The fruits of this capacity we call civilization. But all that is finished, perhaps. Welcome to the shallows, where the un-educating of homo sapiens begins. Nicholas Carr does a wonderful job synthesizing the recent cognitive research. In doing so, he gently refutes the ideologists of progress, and shows what is really at stake in the daily habits of our wired lives: the re-constitution of our minds. What emerges for the reader, inexorably, is the suspicion that we have well and truly screwed ourselves.--Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class As Soulcraft

A thought provoking exploration of the Internet's physical and cultural consequences, rendering highly technical material intelligible to the general reader.--The 2011 Pulitzer Prize Committee

A must-read for any desk jockey concerned about the Web's deleterious effects on the mind.

Starred Review. Carr provides a deep, enlightening examination of how the Internet influences the brain and its neural pathways. Carr's analysis incorporates a wealth of neuroscience and other research, as well as philosophy, science, history and cultural developments ... His fantastic investigation of the effect of the Internet on our neurological selves concludes with a very humanistic petition for balancing our human and computer interactions ... Highly recommended.

This is a measured manifesto. Even as Carr bemoans his vanishing attention span, he's careful to note the usefulness of the Internet, which provides us with access to a near infinitude of information. We might be consigned to the intellectual shallows, but these shallows are as wide as a vast ocean.--Jonah Lehrer

This is a lovely story well told--an ode to a quieter, less frenetic time when reading was more than skimming and thought was more than mere recitation.

The Shallows isn't McLuhan's Understanding Media, but the curiosity rather than trepidation with which Carr reports on the effects of online culture pulls him well into line with his predecessor . . . Carr's ability to crosscut between cognitive studies involving monkeys and eerily prescient prefigurations of the modern computer opens a line of inquiry into the relationship between human and technology.--Ellen Wernecke,

About the Author

Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows, The Big Switch, and Does IT Matter? He has written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Wired, and other periodicals. He lives in Colorado with his wife.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0393072223
• ISBN 13: 9780393072228
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288