Response: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains

I feel bad about my reaction to The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. I think that Nicholas Carr’s book is well-researched, well-written, and interesting. Still, I have the worst kind of complaint to lodge with the author: I think that the entire premise is founded on anecdotal evidence, and I’m not entirely convinced. This is despite the dozens of peer-reviewed studies the author cites which have found that exposure to and use of the internet hurts our brains’ abilities to concentrate, process information, and use it to interact with the world. I don’t doubt those studies’ findings, and I find Carr’s argument about the plasticity of our brains to be compelling and irrefutable. I even loved his logical and historical musings about the foundation of our civilization resting on individuals’ ability to lose themselves in a book – to read and write without distraction. That all sounds pretty solid.

Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m listening to a frazzled quasi-luddite complain about the way that age and technlogy have hurt his personal attention span and capacity for processing knowledge. This is despite the fact that the author explicitly refutes that point early in the book. Others feel this way too, he says. Studies have confirmed his personal findings. If you think it through rationally, of course our brains have had to adapt to the new media and technology environment, and the changes will not all be good. And too, as a “born digital” millennial, as the media likes to call us, I can’t claim to have known anything other than the way I interact with a wireless world.

So I don’t have anything real to challenge his argument, except for my own anecdotal evidence that I can function in this analog world with myriad distractions and pings and ringtones. Anecdotally, I guess I’m as bad as he is.

Edit: Phew! After an enlightening conversation in Michael O’Malley’s Clio Wired class last night, I finally understand what was bugging me. Carr goes to great lengths to explain how the wiring of our brains is always changing – adapting to new challenges and maximizing efficiency to deal with repeated and vital tasks. This, he says, is the problem: our brains have been rewired by the constant distractions of the Internet and hypertext to make us unable to focus in the way we once did, concentrating deeply on a printed text.

Essentially, Carr, having just told us that our remarkable brains can adapt to any situation that we ask, then argues that our brains are in existential danger. It’s like a father showing his son how to cross his eyes and make funny faces then immediately warning him not to do so, or it will stick that way.

I find that his dire warning about the irrevocable changes the era of information overload have wrought on our brains fundamentally undermines his better argument about the plasticity of our brains – organs which, he proves, adapt to culturally-derived needs. If humans could only dive into books once they were safe and well-fed enough in the nurturing embrace of Medieval European abbeys to ignore cacophonous external stimuli, that was because that time and place allowed and required them to do that kind of reading. Maybe our modern world has introduced different types of reading, driven us to distraction, and divided out attention. But at the same time, we aren’t monks in Lombardy poring over arguments about how many Angela can fit on the head of a pin. We’re globally-connected, democratic information consumers – our intellectual grasp of current events, information about our surroundings, and professional expertise are vital social currency that we can only accumulate by reading a great amount and a great variety of the content which is literally swirling all around us. Aren’t our brains adapting to that reality? And isn’t that going to be good in the end?