‘The Shallows’: Click, Skim, Forget
A review of ‘The Shallows’, by Nicholas Carr; Atlantic Books, 2020.
I must be honest (I could never lie to you, reader): Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is not the most stylish book I have ever read. But what it lacks in ornament it makes up for in clarity of purpose, which is to show us that the internet, that shimmering marvel of modernity, is making us – well, a bit thick. Curiously his book diagnoses the problem only to tell us it is probably too late for a cure. The, as it were, patient – the mind, that dignified seat of creation and meditation – now flits and jitters from one distraction to the next like a caffeinated squirrel, and there is not much we can do about it.
Carr’s argument is so simple you could write it down on a napkin: the internet is not just changing what we think about, but how we think. With each click, swipe, and scroll, we become less attentive, analytical, and patient. The brain circuits once given over to, say, mulling over the mysteries of the cosmos now look like the workings of a pinball machine: flashing, noisy, and reactive. But Carr is not nostalgic for a quieter age. Nor is his book a sermon on the evils of modernity (though it does at times resemble one). What he is concerned with is explaining and understanding this shift in our way of thinking, which took place so subtly – and yet, so suddenly – that none of us knew it was happening.
Carr’s argument is straightforward enough to scribble on a napkin: the internet is not just changing what we think about, but how we think altogether.
As Carr explains, the internet is not just a tool. It shapes the way we think. It may seem harmless; certainly it is helpful. But its structure encourages certain habits of mind. It pushes us to go fast instead of slow, to skim and not think deeply, to jump from one thing to the next instead of sticking with one idea. The more we use it, the more our minds get used to being scattered and distracted. Because neurons ‘that wire together, fire together’, as Donald Hebb put it, we soon become very good at scanning information, but very bad at taking it in. Carr says we end up with ‘jet-ski minds’ — we race across the surface of life, never plunging into the deep.
As you will have guessed (or perhaps even protested), this is not the first time some new bit of kit has changed our brains. In fact the argument that technology reshapes cognition is as old as writing. Socrates was suspicious of the written word, convinced that it would weaken the memory and promote an illusion of wisdom. In more recent centuries, the mechanical clock has changed the way we think, turning time into a series of distinct and measurable units—what Bergson calls temps, as against durée, time as an unbroken flow, like a river—and inspiring the modern fixation with productivity. The internet is thus only the latest form of technology to warp the human mind, and hence human culture. But it is a particularly powerful form, which means that its effect on our minds—and our cultures—is profound.
The clock, in fact, reoriented our understanding of time so radically that it thoroughly reshaped the culture.
Connecting the dots is Carr’s skill. He draws on neuroscience, media theory, and cultural history to show how the brain, in its plasticity, adapts to the tools it uses. When we read books, we become calmer, more focused, and able to follow complex trains of thought. But when we live on phones and computers, with their nudges and notifications, their tempting little links, and their rows upon rows of attractive applications, we become restless, distracted, addicted to newness. Carr does not waste time asking if this is ‘progress’. He clearly thinks it in’t. What he does not quite offer, though, is any way out. Yes, we can ‘unplug’, read more books, slow down, etc. — but he also seems to accept that we probably won’t, in part because the internet has shaped our minds in such a way that unplugging, reading books and slowing down feels intolerable, at least for some of us. The internet is not like television or even the printing press. It is everywhere, all the time. To leave it behind for good would be like trying to escape gravity.
So The Shallows reads almost like an obituary or perhaps a coroner’s inquest for a certain style of thinking. I would have liked to read more about what the internet is doing to our empathy, say, or our appreciation of myth, metaphor, meaning; but no one is perfect. And Carr does a good job of charting our apparently irreversible intellectual decay. There is even something oddly refreshing about his fatalism. He does not clutch his pearls or ask us, at least with any zeal, to call on our inner Canutes and try to drive back the tide. He just points out, with a certain weariness, that the tide is full of sewage. So read it, if you want. Then toss your phone into the sea, or perhaps build a fire. If that fails, then take a seat, pour a glass of wine, and try to enjoy these last days of mental civilisation.
