The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

“I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concertation starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.”

In this passage, Carr describes the personal experience that led him to write the original Atlantic article that this book is based on. The syntax of this passage mirrors its content: as Carr describes reading a book, he writes in a long, complex sentence, but when he pivots to describing his current reading habits, he writes in short, sudden sentences. In the context of the larger argument, this passage continues building the emotional connection between Carr and the reader by describing a common experience.

“You know the rest of the story because it’s probably your story too. Ever-faster chips. Ever-quicker modems. DVDs and DVD burners. Gigabyte-sized hard drives. Yahoo and Amazon and eBay. MP3s. Streaming video. Broadband. Napster and Google. BlackBerrys and iPods. Wi-fi networks. YouTube and Wikipedia. Blogging and micro-blogging. Smartphones, thumb drives, netbooks. Who could resist? Certainly not I.”

In this passage, Carr addresses the reader directly to create a camaraderie between himself and his audience. The following series of sentence fragments mimics the quick, overwhelming onslaught of technology that Carr describes. The rhetorical question—“Who could resist?”—suggests that eagerly accepting every technological advancement is not a flaw or a fault but a perfectly reasonable response. This characterization is important for keeping the reader from becoming defensive in response to Carr’s later critiques of the Internet.

“Sometime in 2007, a serpent of doubt slithered into my info-paradise.”

This quote contains an allusion to the Biblical serpent in the Garden of Eden. Through this allusion, Carr claims that the blissful ignorance he held toward the Internet’s effects is like the innocence that Adam and Eve had before the serpent tempted them and that once he started investigating the Internet’s effects, he couldn’t un-see them. Rather than a fall from grace, Carr’s awakening to the power of the Internet gave him the tools to combat its effects.

“Our ways of thinking, perceiving, and acting, we now know, are not entirely determined by our genes. Nor are they entirely determined by our childhood experiences. We change them through the way we live—and, as Nietzsche sense, through the tools we use. Years before Edward Taub opened his rehabilitation clinic in Alabama, he conducted a famous experiment on a group of right-handed violinists […] playing a violin, a musical tool, had resulted in substantial physical changes in the brain. That was true even for the musicians who had first taken up their instruments as adults.”

Taub’s experiment fits into the larger timeline of neuroplasticity experiments that proved human brains change constantly through adulthood. Carr’s argument is linear; to convince his audience that the Internet has affected their cognition, he first sets out to prove that brains are capable of change at all. As part of his rhetorical strategy to situate the reader in historical context, Carr frames the Taub experiment temporally against Nietzsche and Taub’s rehabilitation clinic, which he referenced earlier in the chapter.

“Plastic does not mean elastic, in other words. Our neural loops don’t snap back to their former state the way a rubber band does; they hold onto their changed state. And nothing says the new state has to be a desirable one. Bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones.”

Carr uses the image of a rubber band to summarize the research he described earlier in the chapter: The brain doesn’t return to its former state once it’s been affected. Carr combines neuroscience with approachable imagery to help the reader understand complex topics. Carr renames the “changed state” as a “habit” in this passage, translating neuroscientific concepts into everyday terms.

“If the proliferation of public clocks changed the way people worked, shopped, played, and otherwise behaved as members of an ever more regulated society, the spread of more personal tools for tracking time—chamber clocks, pocket watches, and, a little later, wristwatches—had more intimate consequences. The personal clock became, as [David] Landes writes, ‘an ever-visible, ever-audible companion and monitor.’ By continually reminding its over of ‘time used, time spent, time water, time lost’ it became both ‘prod and key to personal achievement and productivity.’”

Carr appeals to David Landes’s history of timekeeping, Revolution in Time, to demonstrate how once clocks were widely accessible and inexpensive, they could exert influence over people’s everyday lives and change their relationship to time. Carr’s discussion of the clock serves as an example of how intellectual technology affected human society and cognition.

“Language itself is not a technology. It’s native to our species. Our brains and bodies have evolved to speak and hear words. A child learns to talk without instruction, as a fledgling bird learns to fly. Because reading and writing have become so central to our identity and culture, it’s easy to assume that they, too, are innate talents. But they’re not. Reading and writing are unnatural acts, made possible by the purposeful development of the alphabet and many other technologies.”

Though Carr uses the example of the clock and the map to illustrate the basics of intellectual technology, he relies on the book to show how language technologies affect people to a greater degree. Before he can use this example, however, he must prove that reading and writing are technologies rather than “innate” skills. If the reader sees reading and writing as natural, Carr will be unable to use the book as a comparable example to the Internet, which is universally understood as unnatural. Carr’s contention is that printed texts only appear more “natural” than digital ones because they have existed much longer.

“Priests and politicians began to wonder whether, as England’s first official book censor put it in 1660, ‘more mischief than advantage were not occasion’d to the Christian world by the Invention of Typography.’ The famed Spanish dramatist Lop de Vega expressed the feelings of many a grandee when, in his 1612 play All Citizens Are Soldiers, he wrote:

‘So many books—so much confusion!

All around us an ocean of print

And most of it covered in froth.’

But the froth itself was vital. Far from dampening the intellectual transformation wrought by the printed book, it magnified it.”

This passage describes the public response following the invention of the Gutenberg press and the international explosion of published print media. According to Carr, it was the common literature that was the most effective in spreading the literary ethic. Through this allusion, Carr is also suggesting that commonplace Internet use—games, social media—is responsible for the global proliferation of the Internet.

“Like our forebears during the later years of the Middle Ages, we find ourselves today between two technological worlds. After 550 years, the printing press and its products are being pushed from the center of our intellectual life to its edge. The shift began the middle years of the twentieth century, when we started devoting more and more of our time and attention to the cheap, copious, and endlessly entertaining products of the first wave of electric and electronic media.”

This passage connects Carr’s intellectual history of the book to the coming exploration of the Internet and its effects. By positioning his discussion about the Internet in the context of the broader timeline of human technology, Carr suggests that the Internet and its effect on society is part of a larger pattern. In connecting his critique of the Internet to a larger pattern, Carr attempts to refute those who would argue that his claims simply come from a place of fearmongering or resistance to change.

“Over the past three decades, the number of instructions a computer chip can process every second has doubled about every three years, while the cost of processing those instructions has fallen by almost half every year. Overall, the price of a typical computing task has dropped by 99.9 percent since the 1960s. Network bandwidth has expanded at an equally fast clip, with the Internet traffic doubling, on average, every year since the World Wide Web was invented.”

In context, these facts about computer processing speeds support Carr’s comparison between the book and the Internet. Just as the Gutenberg press exponentially increased literacy because of its speed and decreased expense, so will Internet use exponentially increase as its speed increases and its price decreases. These computer-processing facts also support Carr’s overall project of demystifying the history of the Internet for his younger readers, who relate to the Internet as a given.

“The Net differs from most of the mass media it replaces in an obvious and very important way: it’s bidirectional. We can send messages through the network as receive them. That’s made the system all the more useful. The ability to exchange information online, to upload as download, has turned the Net into a thoroughfare for business and commerce […] But the Net doesn’t just connect us with businesses; it connects us with one another.”

This passage identifies why Internet use grew so much faster in comparison to the hundreds of years between the advent of the alphabet and the popularity of the book. Due to its “most general nature,” the Internet could not only take over multiple forms of media but also improve on them. Its usefulness across so many arenas in life ensured its quick adoption. Though television and print media could be bidirectional, the trading of messages required time and money. A person could, with the right equipment, make their own television show, but without the proper financial backing and network support, that show would likely never be broadcast. Internet media like YouTube made it significantly easier for people to send messages through video. The same is true for email and social media; the Internet eliminates lag between messages, making it incredibly useful.

“A search engine often draws our attention to a particular snippet of text, a few words or sentences that have strong relevance to whatever we’re searching for at the moment, while providing little incentive for taking the work as a whole. We don’t see the forest when we search the Web. We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves. As companies like Google and Microsoft perfect search engines for video and audio content, more products are undergoing the fragmentation that already characterizes written works.”

Carr plays on the idiom “not see the forest for the trees” to show how search engines can remove information from its appropriate context. The phrase traditionally refers to a person who is so focused on the details of a situation that they cannot understand the larger context or see how the details affect broader concerns. Carr refers to the search engine results as “twigs and leaves” to highlight how search engines produce results without any explanation of what the results mean. Carr contrasts “twigs and leaves” with “the forest” to emphasize how the structure of the Internet often obscures context and holistic comprehension.

“Now that the context of reading is again shifting, from the private page to the communal screen, authors will adapt once more. They will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the essayist Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.”

In contrast to Carr’s carefully researched claims throughout The Shallows, in this passage, his assertion is primarily a hypothesis. Based on the Internet’s preference for quick, simple messages that can be scanned and understood, Carr assumes that writing will, on the whole, become more direct. Carr also supposes that social media will encourage book reading for social, rather than personal, reasons. As Carr notes elsewhere, he is limited by what research is available to support his claims. As of the 2012 paperback edition, Carr seems unable to support his hypothesis beyond referencing other writers.

“When we use Facebook, we attract new friends or form closer bonds with old ones. When we send a tweet through Twitter, we gain new followers. When we write a blog post, we get comments from readers or links from other bloggers. The net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”

Carr uses repetitive syntax in this passage to simulate the repeated positive reinforcement people receive when they interact online. He uses the metaphor of the lab rat to characterize Internet users as mindless, stuck in a loop that appeals to their baser instincts. By comparing people to animals, particularly lab rats, Carr suggests that Internet users are manipulated by the technology, rather than expertly wielding it.

“Research by Ap Dijksterhuis […] indicates that such breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple with a problem, bringing to bear information and cognitive processes unavailable to conscious deliberation […] But Dijksterhuis’s work also shows that our unconscious though processes don’t engage with a problem until we’re clearly and consciously define the problem. If we don’t have a particular intellectual goal in mind, Dijksterhuis writes, ‘unconscious thought does not occur.’”

Carr uses Dijksterhuis’s research to rebut the claim that distraction, at least as it’s caused by the Internet, can be cognitively useful. Carr concedes that breaks in attention can be helpful, but only once a problem is defined. This means that Internet-based distraction isn’t universally useful, only when the brain has a specific problem its seeking to solve. The skimming or scrolling creates distraction without purpose.

“If working memory is the mind’s scratch pad, then long-term memory is its filing system. The contents of our long-term memory lie mainly outside of our consciousnesses. In order for us to think about something we’ve previously learned or experience, our brain has to transfer the memory from long-term memory back into working memory.”

Carr uses the metaphor of the scratch pad and the filing system to introduce the neuroscientific concept of short- and long-term memory. Following this passage, Carr launches an exploration of the scientific research that supports this metaphor. The metaphor of the scratch pad and the filing system is important because it establishes a baseline understanding of the concepts that Carr will go on to explain in more detail. This metaphor acts as an organizing image for the reader, easing comprehension of complex scientific concepts.

“Supplying information in more than one form doesn’t always take a toll on understanding. As we all know from reading illustrated textbooks and manuals, pictures can help clarify and reinforce written explanations. Education researchers have also found that carefully designed presentations that combine audio and visual explanations or instructions can enhance students’ learning […] The Internet, however, wasn’t built by educators to optimize learning. It presents information not in a carefully balanced way but as a concentration-fragmenting mishmash.”

Carr is careful to establish boundaries around his argument in this passage. He doesn’t argue against multimodal presentations; he argues that the Internet in its un-curated form is not the same medium as an illustrated textbook or a visual presentation. In this passage, Carr also points to the Internet’s “builder”—some person or entity that oversees how the Internet operates. Carr will expand on this in the next chapter, where he directly confronts the belief that the Internet exists as an objective tool.

“Google is, quite literally, in the business of distraction. Google may yet turn out to be a flash in the pan […] But no matter how long the company is able to maintain its dominance over the flow of digital information, its intellectual ethic will remain the general ethic of the Internet as a medium. Web publishers and toolmakers will continue to attract traffic and make money by encouraging and feeding our hunger for small, rapidly dispensed pieces of information.”

In this passage, Carr connects Google’s decision-making as a company to the impact of the Internet on cognition. Google’s ad revenue depends on the number of clicks an ad receives, so Google has an economic incentive to build its search engine to encourage rapid skimming and clicking, and it also has an economic incentive to make the Internet faster and more accessible. Carr’s reference to people’s “hunger” for “small, rapidly dispensed” information alludes to his own metaphor of the lab rat in Chapter 7. In the lab rat metaphor, he characterized the general population as manipulated by whoever controls the Internet; in this chapter, Carr reveals that one of those controlling forces is the company, Google.

“For Google, with its faith in efficiency as the ultimate good and its attendant desire ‘to get users in and out really quickly,’ the unbinding of the book entails no loss, only gain. Google Book Search manager Adam Mathes grants that ‘books often live a vibrant life offline,’ but he says that they’ll be able to ‘live an even more exciting life online.’ What does it mean for a book to lead a more exiting life?”

In this passage, Carr uses the rhetorical question “What does it mean for a book to lead a more exiting life?” to accomplish several goals. First, the rhetorical question invites the reader to critically analyze Adam Mathes’s quote and, by extension, critically analyze the Google Book Search project. Second, the question implies that the phrase “a more exciting life” isn’t inherently obvious and that readers should pay attention to how advertising language tries to influence their choices.

“Memory, for Seneca as for Erasmus, was as much a crucible as container. It was more than the sum of things remembered. It was something newly made, the essence of a unique self.”

Carr uses the metaphor of a crucible to explain how pre-20th-century philosophers understood human memory. A crucible is a vessel where metals are melted together to form something new. Rather than imagine that the human mind simply held onto facts like a filing cabinet, early thinkers believed that the process of memorization was integral in creating new knowledge. In Chapter 9, Carr uses scientific research about memory and learning to demonstrate that human memory is more like a crucible than a container after all.

“The changes in our brains happen automatically, outside the narrow compass of our consciousness, but that doesn’t absolve us from responsibility for the choices we made. One thing that sets us apart from other animals is the command we have been granted over our attention. ‘Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think’ said the novelist David Foster Wallace in a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005.”

According to Carr, David Foster Wallace can speak authoritatively on the importance of attention and quality of thought because of his lifetime battles with mental illness. Carr uses Wallace’s quote as a pivot toward the conclusion of The Shallows, turning the book’s argument toward a call to action for the reader. Through Wallace, Carr suggests that the antidote for distraction is greater criticality toward content and media.

“I know what you’re thinking. The very existence of this book would seem to contradict its thesis. If I’m finding it so hard to concentrate, to focus on a line of thought, how in the world did I manage to write a few hundred pages of at least semi coherent prose? It wasn’t easy.”

This passage contains an example of hypophora—a question followed immediately by an answer. Hypophora typically creates the illusion of dialogue between the author and the reader and contributes to a conversational tone. Carr raises a possible criticism against The Shallows—that the “existence of this book would […] contradict its thesis”—and then answers it with a personal story of how he dealt with distraction while writing.

“Our mental adaptability, built into the deepest workings of our brains, is a keynote of intellectual history. But if there’s comfort in their reassurances, it’s of a very cold sort. Adaptation leaves us better suited to our circumstance, but qualitatively it’s a neutral process. What matters in the end is not our becoming but what we become.”

As part of Carr’s conclusion to The Shallows, this passage articulates his ultimate argument: If unchecked, Internet use will make people less empathetic, less considerate, and less human. When Carr calls adaptation a “qualitatively neutral process,” he is asserting that a changing brain isn’t a positive or negative thing, it’s simply what the brain does in response to repeated stimulus. To make a value judgment on a cognitive change, people must actively judge its consequences.