The Shallows What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains Summary

The Shallows: What the Net Is Doing to Our Brains
Past Nicholas Carr
Hardcover, 276 pages
W.W. Norton & Co.
List cost: $26.95

Pundits accept been trying to coffin the book for a long fourth dimension. In the early on years of the nineteenth century, the burgeoning popularity of newspapers -- well over a hundred were beingness published in London alone -- led many observers to assume that books were on the verge of obsolescence. How could they compete with the immediacy of the daily broadsheet? "Before this century shall finish, journalism will exist the whole press -- the whole human thought," declared the French poet and pol Alphonse de Lamartine in 1831. "Thought will spread across the earth with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood. It will blanket the earth from one pole to the other -- sudden, instantaneous, burning with the fervor of the soul from which it burst forth. This will exist the reign of the human word in all its plenitude. Idea will not take time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book -- the book will arrive too late. The only volume possible from today is a paper."

Lamartine was mistaken. At the century'due south end, books were however effectually, living happily abreast newspapers. Just a new threat to their existence had already emerged: Thomas Edison'due south phonograph. It seemed obvious, at to the lowest degree to the intelligentsia, that people would soon exist listening to literature rather than reading it. In an 1889 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, Philip Hubert predicted that "many books and stories may non see the calorie-free of print at all; they will become into the easily of their readers, or hearers rather, as phonograms." The phonograph, which at the time could tape sounds equally well as play them, also "promises to far outstrip the typewriter" as a tool for composing prose, he wrote. That same year, the futurist Edward Bellamy suggested, in a Harper'southward article, that people would come up to read "with the optics close." They would behave around a tiny audio thespian, called an "indispensable," which would contain all their books, newspapers, and magazines. Mothers, wrote Bellamy, would no longer take "to brand themselves hoarse telling the children stories on rainy days to keep them out of mischief." The kids would all take their own indispensables.

V years subsequently, Scribner'due south Magazine delivered the seeming coup de grace to the codex, publishing an article titled "The Terminate of Books" past Octave Uzanne, an eminent French author and publisher. "What is my view of the destiny of books, my dear friends?" he wrote. "I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg's invention can practice otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretation of our mental products." Printing, a "somewhat antiquated procedure" that for centuries "has reigned despotically over the mind of human," would exist replaced past "phonography," and libraries would be turned into "phonographotecks." We would see a return of "the art of utterance," as narrators took the place of writers. "The ladies," Uzanne ended, "will no longer say in speaking of a successful author, 'What a charming writer!' All shuddering with emotion, they will sigh, 'Ah, how this "Teller's" voice thrills you, charms you, moves you.'"

The book survived the phonograph as it had the newspaper. Listening didn't replace reading. Edison'south invention came to be used mainly for playing music rather than declaiming poetry and prose. During the twentieth century, book reading would withstand a fresh onslaught of seemingly mortal threats: moviegoing, radio listening, TV viewing. Today, books remain as commonplace as e'er, and at that place's every reason to believe that printed works will go along to be produced and read, in some sizable quantity, for years to come. While physical books may be on the road to obsolescence, the road will almost certainly be a long and winding one. Nevertheless the connected existence of the codex, though it may provide some cheer to bibliophiles, doesn't change the fact that books and book reading, at least as we've defined those things in the past, are in their cultural twilight. Equally a society, we devote e'er less time to reading printed words, and even when we do read them, we exercise so in the decorated shadow of the Internet. "Already," the literary critic George Steiner wrote in 1997, "the silences, the arts of concentration and memorization, the luxuries of time on which 'loftier reading' depended are largely tending." But "these erosions," he continued, "are nearly insignificant compared with the brave new world of the electronic." 50 years agone, it would have been possible to brand the case that we were however in the historic period of print. Today, information technology is not.

Some thinkers welcome the eclipse of the book and the literary mind it fostered. In a recent address to a group of teachers, Mark Federman, an didactics researcher at the Academy of Toronto, argued that literacy, as nosotros've traditionally understood it, "is at present null simply a quaint notion, an artful form that is as irrelevant to the existent questions and issues of pedagogy today as is recited verse -- clearly not devoid of value, simply every bit no longer the structuring strength of gild." The fourth dimension has come, he said, for teachers and students alike to abandon the "linear, hierarchical" globe of the book and enter the Web'southward "world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity" -- a world in which "the greatest skill" involves "discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux."

Clay Shirky, a digital-media scholar at New York University, suggested in a 2008 blog post that nosotros shouldn't waste our time mourning the death of deep reading -- it was overrated all forth. "No 1 reads War and Peace," he wrote, singling out Tolstoy'south epic as the quintessence of high literary achievement. "It's too long, and non so interesting." People have "increasingly decided that Tolstoy'south sacred piece of work isn't actually worth the time it takes to read it." The aforementioned goes for Proust's In Search of Lost Time and other novels that until recently were considered, in Shirky'south cutting phrase, "Very Important in some vague manner." Indeed, we've "been emptily praising" writers like Tolstoy and Proust "all these years." Our old literary habits "were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished admission." Now that the Internet has granted united states abundant "access," Shirky concluded, we tin can at last lay those tired habits aside.

Such proclamations seem a piddling too staged to have seriously. They come up off as the latest manifestation of the outré posturing that has ever characterized the anti-intellectual wing of academia. But, then again, there may be a more charitable caption. Federman, Shirky, and others similar them may be early exemplars of the post-literary heed, intellectuals for whom the screen rather than the folio has ever been the principal conduit of information. As Alberto Manguel has written, "At that place is an unbridgeable chasm between the volume that tradition has declared a classic and the book (the same book) that nosotros have made ours through instinct, emotion and understanding: suffered through it, rejoiced in it, translated it into our feel and (nonetheless the layers of readings with which a volume comes into our easily) essentially become its first readers." If y'all lack the time, the involvement, or the facility to inhabit a literary piece of work -- to make information technology your own in the manner Manguel describes -- then of course you'd consider Tolstoy'south masterpiece to be "also long, and not then interesting."

Although it may exist tempting to ignore those who advise the value of the literary mind has always been exaggerated, that would be a error. Their arguments are some other of import sign of the fundamental shift taking place in guild's attitude toward intellectual achievement. Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and disposable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual comprehend that allows thoughtful people to sideslip comfortably into the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.

Our want for fast-moving, kaleidoscopic diversions didn't originate with the invention of the World Wide Spider web. Information technology has been present and growing for many decades, as the stride of our work and habitation lives has quickened and as broadcast media similar radio and tv have presented us with a welter of programs, messages, and advertisements. The Internet, though it marks a radical divergence from traditional media in many means, besides represents a continuation of the intellectual and social trends that emerged from people'south embrace of the electrical media of the twentieth century and that take been shaping our lives and thoughts ever since. The distractions in our lives accept been proliferating for a long time, but never has at that place been a medium that, like the Net, has been programmed to and then widely scatter our attention and to practice it and so insistently.

David Levy, in Scrolling Forward, describes a coming together he attended at Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Middle in the mid-1970s, a time when the high-tech lab's engineers and programmers were devising many of the features we at present take for granted in our personal computers. A group of prominent computer scientists had been invited to PARC to see a sit-in of a new operating system that fabricated "multitasking" piece of cake. Unlike traditional operating systems, which could display but one job at a time, the new arrangement divided a screen into many "windows," each of which could run a unlike program or brandish a unlike document. To illustrate the flexibility of the arrangement, the Xerox presenter clicked from a window in which he had been composing software code to another window that displayed a newly arrived due east-mail bulletin. He apace read and replied to the message, then hopped back to the programming window and continued coding. Some in the audition applauded the new organization. They saw that it would enable people to utilize their computers much more efficiently. Others recoiled from it. "Why in the world would you desire to be interrupted -- and distracted -- by electronic mail while programming?" one of the attention scientists angrily demanded.

The question seems quaint today. The windows interface has become the interface for all PCs and for well-nigh other computing devices too. On the Internet, there are windows inside windows within windows, not to mention long ranks of tabs primed to trigger the opening of fifty-fifty more than windows. Multitasking has become so routine that most of us would notice information technology intolerable if we had to go back to computers that could run simply one plan or open merely one file at a fourth dimension. And withal, even though the question may take been rendered moot, it remains equally vital today equally it was 30-v years ago. It points, as Levy says, to "a conflict between 2 different means of working and two different understandings of how technology should be used to support that work." Whereas the Xerox researcher "was eager to juggle multiple threads of work simultaneously," the skeptical questioner viewed his own work "as an practise in alone, singleminded concentration." In the choices we have fabricated, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us. We have cast our lot with the juggler.

Excerpted from The Shallows: What the Cyberspace Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Copyright 2010 by Nicholas Carr. Excerpted by permission of W.Due west. Norton & Co.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127370598