Trapped in the net

For all its benefits the internet might not be the universal friend we believe. In his new book The Shallows Nicholas Carr argues that it has a serious drawback: it is turning us into superficial minds addicted to information highs and endangering our ability to contemplate deeper questions of existence. By Ed O'Hare.

Several years ago Nicholas Carr realised that he had a problem. He could no longer immerse himself in books. His eyes grew restless, he found lengthy passages arduous and constantly felt he was dragging his "wayward brain back to the text." Carr became convinced that someone or something had been "tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory." Eventually it occurred to Carr what was happening. He was reading the printed page in the same way he would a website.

Until then Carr had been a champion of the Net. A freelance writer, he could see the advantages of having "immediate access to such an incredibly rich and easily searched store of data." Like most of us the Internet had become Carr's "all-purpose medium" and the conduit "for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind."

Also like us, he had never conceived that in the same way that the web has changed how we work, study and socialize it might also have the potential to change the very way we think.

Carr is now certain that the Internet has the power to shape the processes of thought. It has become essential to countless aspects of our lives and our brains have had to adjust to this. Instead of receiving information of many kinds from numerous different sources it has brought all data together in one ceaseless digital torrent. Magnificent achievement though this undoubtedly is, it is having dire effects on our ability to imagine and create. As Carr writes "whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles." Thanks to the web the ocean of knowledge may never have been deeper but our capacity to learn has never been more shallow.

The argument Carr outlines in his new book The Shallows is founded in firm scientific bedrock. Recent studies have finally proven a long suspected theory (originally proposed by William James and Sigmund Freud amongst others) that our brains are not full of hardwiring. Unlike the components of a machine, the cells of the brain don't have specific functions but adapt to new purposes. Instead of becoming fixed on maturity the brain's neurological circuits, some 100 billion neurons, remain plastic and continue to rewire themselves by forming synaptic connections throughout adulthood. As our routines and habits change our neural pathways are constantly uprooted and new ones forged. What fires these adjustments is external stimulation, what we experience through our senses, and this has become dominated by the web.

The Internet has totally altered the way we read because it encourages us to scan through texts hunting for what we are looking for rather than reading them carefully. Carr describes this as erratic 'bottom-up' reading instead of linear 'top-down' reading. As he writes, "When we go on the web we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning." The proliferation of hypertext and the use of multiple applications means that we are being continually diverted and our ability to concentrate is impaired. As Carr puts it, "the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it." As we get used to online reading this becomes our mind's operative mode. We find ourselves trapped in a routine of unfocused, unproductive thinking and become mere intellectual jugglers rather serious critical readers.

The Internet has proven dangerous because it can reshape the brain infinitely more quickly than any other human invention. We are won over by the intense stimulation the Web offers but its "rapid-fire delivery of competing messages and stimuli" overloads our short-term memory and we remember almost nothing of what we read. The Net also "delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli" and produces the exact pattern of synchronized physical and mental action that is very hard to escape. In other words, it's strongly addictive, especially for young people. The Net utilizes 'positive reinforcement,' a reward system that leaves us no more than "lab rats pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social and intellectual nourishment."

What concerns Carr most is the long-term results that the Internet is going to have. He notes that although the Web has been available to most students for over a decade the quality and range of their research has not increased. He also explains how Larry Page and the rest of his team at Google have undertaken one of the most momentous projects in cultural history, the scanning of all books in a bid to create the ultimate database, but shows this scheme to be crucially undermined by the same basic problem: the Internet's tit-bit approach to information dissemination promotes lazy, haphazard reading instead of profound, in-depth analysis. As Carr explains, "it presents information not in a carefully balanced way but as a concentration-fragmenting mish-mash." If the Net becomes the only source of knowledge humanity shall be all the poorer for it.

The Shallows is a rewarding and expertly researched book. A long overdue clarion call, it's all the more interesting since Carr is not a luddite. On the contrary, his fascination with technology is clear and this makes his growing distrust of the Internet absorbing reading. Carr is aware that civilization often undergoes sudden and violent change but that something better normally follows in its wake. However, he can predict an impoverished future age when the habit of skimming through information has resulted in in a world where deep, meditative thought has vanished and all we seek is our next knowledge-hit. If this happens the prophecy of the philosopher Martin Heidegger will come true and "calculative thinking" shall "come to be accepted and practised as the only way of thinking." Like the some nightmarish science-fiction novel, we shall become flesh and blood computers.

The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember by Nicholas Carr

Published by Atlantic Books

384 pages