The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Nicholas Carr, W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, 276 pgs.

Review by John Scott Legg

In 2008 Nicholas Carr inspired a good deal of discussion with a cover article he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly with the blunt but provocative title “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is an expansion of that article in both breadth and depth. Written for a popular audience, the book is a careful dissent from the mainstream thinking that prevails today, thinking not commonly inclined to seriously question, beyond the superficial, the true significance of technology in our lives, let alone how it may be affecting the very definition of what it means to be human. Carr does this, and so places himself on a small but important shelf of writers who have attempted to put the technological advances of humanity into a larger, more meaningful, perspective. Reading The Shallows, one comes to realize just how extremely important, and rare, such a perspective is these days.

Nicholas Carr is not, however, a critic of technology as such. Rather, his book can be seen as an attempt, sprung from the very mainstream thinking just mentioned, to reinsert the human being into our understanding of today’s world. He begins with his own story, the path that led him to write the Atlantic article and then this book. As is the case for many people of a certain age, the story of the growth and development of home computing and later, the internet, is reflected in Carr’s own biography. Hardly a Luddite, Carr briefly outlines the role of computers in his life history with no regrets and a good deal of informed appreciation. As a young man in 1986 he spent most of his and his wife’s savings on an early Macintosh. He recalls how, turning it on for the first time, he immediately found himself “smitten.” He bought a modem in 1990 and was among the first wave online. “When the Web went 2.0 around 2005,” Carr writes, “I went 2.0 with it.” He registered his own online domain, started a blog, joined all the major social networking sites, and enjoyed constantly keeping up with the world in a way that felt to him both “new and liberating.” A few years later, sometime in 2007, a “serpent of doubt” entered Carr’s “info-paradise” and he “began to notice that the Net was exerting a much stronger and broader influence” over him than his old stand-alone PC ever had. His ability to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes had all but disappeared, and he found himself, even when away from his computer, longing to check his email, to do some Googling, to “be connected.” He came to realize that the very way that he used to think had changed, and not necessarily for the better.

Thus begins his journey. The book that follows is, at its heart, an attempt by the author to validate, and in some sense rescue, a picture of the human being that is becoming increasingly invisible in light of, among other things, the “intelligent” machines that first we program and “thereafter they program us.” It is also intended as an awakener. The shift from an “analog” to a “digital” world occurred so rapidly that it seems to have happened somewhere beneath our waking consciousness. This shift, of course, is still ongoing. Already today, and increasingly in coming generations, advanced forms of digital technology will be entwined with human beings from the cradle to the grave as a matter of course. What relationships are there between human beings and these technologies we have created? How does technology change us, change how we think? To what extent is it permissible to attribute intelligence to machines? What is the concept of the human being behind all these developments? Is Google making us stupid? These are some of the main questions Carr deals with in the ten chapters and four unnumbered “digressions” of The Shallows.

After sharing his own story in the first chapter, Carr endeavors to establish a working picture of the human being. His starting point, not unsurprisingly, is today’s science of the brain. It is, after all, intelligence that is at issue here. Carr is an adept synthesizer of scientific research, and his book is further enhanced with brief, lively, and illustrative historical and mythological anecdotes. The story that introduces the book’s second chapter, “The Vital Paths,” concerns the consequences of Friedrich Nietzsche’s purchase of his first typewriter in 1882. A friend, in a letter to Nietzsche, remarks on the subtle but recognizable change in the philosopher’s writing style after his compositional switch from pen to typewriter. “Our writing equipment,” Nietzsche observed in his reply, “takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

This is a useful tale for Carr’s theme and he will have occasion to revisit it. It is told by way of introducing one of the more exciting developments in neuroscience of the past thirty years, the long-delayed acknowledgment of the phenomenon of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s enormous—and admittedly little-understood—ability to “restructure and reorganize itself on the cellular level.” The idea is not new. Proposed in the late 19th century by William James and others, it was generally ignored until the 1970s and 80s. Today, the widespread acceptance of neuroplasticity has completely overturned the long-held academic view of the mature brain as being fixed and unchanging. The metaphor of the machine no longer applies: brains are “flexible...they change with experience, circumstance, and need.” This is of course a scientific validation of an observation that is itself hardly new: namely, that human beings are never, by default, finished products, but have the innate and continuing capacity to improve, learn, adapt, change, evolve. Applying this understanding to how cells function has already led to new, ingenious treatments for people suffering from serious injuries, enabling them to quite literally heal themselves by, for instance, “coaxing [the] neurons and synapses to form new circuits” that then “take over the functions once carried out” by circuits in a damaged part of the brain. Good stuff indeed. There is, however, a downside to neuroplasticity that is important to Carr’s inquiry. Although this flexibility provides “an escape from genetic determinism” and “a loophole for free thought and free will,” it also, according to the experts—and with them Carr—“imposes its own form of determinism on our behavior.” That is, despite the capacity for flexibility revealed in the working of our brains, the tendency, once the neurons are functioning in a certain manner, is toward rigidity. And “bad habits,” Carr says, “can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones.”

It seems, then, that our ability to evolve mentally does not in any way guarantee, or even necessarily suggest, the direction this evolution will or will not take. The question then is what mental habits are we developing as we marry more and more of our lives and our day-to-day cognitive activities with the ephemeral “intelligence” of the internet? In what direction are we headed? Carr wisely gets to this indirectly. A few chapters of intellectual history follow as he sketches a kind of evolution of consciousness through the developments in our “tools of the mind,” of which the internet is the uncontested pinnacle. Special emphasis is given to the advent, ascent, and apparent decline of that most humble and extraordinary invention, the book, which leads, naturally enough, into the story of the rise of the backlit screen as a primary method of communication.

By the last third of the book, beginning particularly with chapter 7, “The Juggler’s Brain,” we are led closer to the essential question of our humanity—our being human—in relation to the ever-prevalent technologies of our day. Considered from a certain widely held perspective, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that our online lives are making us more, not less, intelligent. Carr’s method of inquiry relies on both historical/literary sources and a broad array of relevant academic research, and he demonstrates convincingly that this perspective is rather superficial. Our much-lauded ability to “multitask” has been repeatedly demonstrated to have detrimental effects on creativity, reasoning, and memory. Similarly, the strengthening of “visual-spatial intelligence” that seems to accompany an increase in working with computers also seems to correlate with a weakening in “inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.” The Internet “is making us smarter,” Carr concludes, “only if we define intelligence by the Net’s own standards.”

That those standards are suprahuman becomes clear in the next, perhaps most telling, chapter of the book, “The Church of Google.” Here Carr introduces a human ideal that is in no way separate from the technology under discussion, but inevitably united with it for the ostensible betterment of humanity. From the perspective of those who would promote artificial intelligence (AI) as a worthy goal and solution to many of the world’s problems, the ideal is in no way human, but rather involves overcoming the flaws of an imperfect computing machine, namely the subjective human mind. The internet is itself a kind of artificial intelligence, as Google’s founders are well aware, and Google’s “mission” to digitize all of the world’s “information” and make it accessible and searchable is very much in line with its AI roots. The force at work behind Google (characterized by its CEO as a “moral force”) is in essence the spirit of the world we enter when we go online. Here lives, although usually in the background, the idea that the human is a being whose intelligence and lot in life would be greatly improved were it supplanted with the artificial intelligence of a reliable computer. As one of Google’s founders told a Newsweek reporter in 2004, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

Carr’s penultimate chapter, called “Search, Memory,” explores more fully the argument, exemplified by Google, that human intelligence can be massively improved by two things: digital access to all of the world’s information, and the “ultimate” search engine to scour said information. He does so by taking up the subject of memory, both human and computer. It certainly says a great deal about the situation we find ourselves in today that a chapter such as this one, which eloquently upholds the dignity and place of human memory as well as points out the differences between it and computer memory, so needed to be written. But it did, and it was, and for that I am grateful. The argument could be clothed in many ways, but Carr’s words are to the point:

Biological memory is alive. Computer memory is not.

Those who celebrate the “outsourcing” of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor. They overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory. What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency. It exists in time, changing as the body changes... Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal. The memory stored in a computer, by contrast, takes the form of distinct and static bits....

Today it is necessary to make such seemingly obvious distinctions. With The Shallows, Nicholas Carr has injected a homeopathic dose of informed and sensible caution into a mainstream that regards with scarcely a question each new technological advance as an inevitable boon to humanity. There is no doubt some truth to this, but it is not a full truth. Gaining a more comprehensive understanding of our situation, of where we are truly headed, and what this all means is not so simple. The Shallows is a much-needed contribution toward just this.

Nicholas Carr