book review: the shallows
thoughts on what the internet is doing to our brains, via Nicholas Carr's "the shallows"
In the late 1800s, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche began to lose his sight, preventing him from writing longhand. In 1882, he received a brand-new invention from the inventor himself: the Hansel Writing Ball, a precursor to the typewriters we see today. Nietzsche learned to touch-type and could once again compose prose. But he, and several of his friends and later academics, thought that the writing ball had changed the nature of his prose. Rather than the flowing, graceful lines he wrote longhand, Neitzsche thought his style had become more rigid and terse—mechanical. "Our writing equipment," he wrote in a letter, "takes part in the forming of our thoughts."
In the book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr often returns to this anecdote. The subtitle of his book is "What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains." The book was published at a time when people were just starting to become aware of how the internet affected not only how we worked and communicated, but how we thought. (This was around the same time as Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier was published, a book I've referenced on this blog a few times now).
The first half of Carr's book is dedicated to tracing the history of intellectual technology—the technology that allows us to think more and differently—all the way back to written language, maps, and keeping time. The internet is just the latest in a long lineage of brain-altering technology, he argues.
Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work. The map and the clock shared a similar ethic. Both placed a new stress on measurement and abstraction, on perceiving and defining forms and processes beyond those apparent to the senses.
With each new kind of technology comes detractors who fear the way it changes our behavior and thoughts. I've heard that when newspapers were invented, people thought that they would make everyone antisocial—when TVs became popular, parents thought they would fry kids' brains.
But I didn't know that Socrates decried the use of written language. Before people could write down their thoughts, bards and philosophers were capable of memorizing long swaths of history and information, and could recite it to audiences at will. Socrates feared that the written word would lead people to offload their memories onto the page—or stone tablet, in the case of ancient Greece---reducing their rich inner intellectual lives.
But, Carr points out, people memorized long works only by using devices such as mnemonics and cliches, which severely limited what kind of styles and stories people could tell. Writing and, just as important, revision enabled more creative and analytical prose. Self-editing allowed writers to refine their language, ideas, analysis, and arguments in ways that hadn't been possible before.
So all technology comes with its positives and its negatives. It all shapes the way we think and be in the world, and poses questions of what we want to gain, what we lose, and therefore what we value.
Carr opens The Shallows by giving quotes and anecdotes from people like him who have noticed something about their brains on the internet. They're unable to read long books; they get bored of an article within the first three paragraphs; they don't remember things as easily as they used to. I was reminded of all the times I'd looked up the address or the bus line I needed, only to have to look it up again a few minutes later. Carr even cited a contemporary philosopher who said that he didn't see the point in reading books anymore—virtual or otherwise.
I was amazed that people were talking about the internet this way ten years ago. Ten years ago, I was mostly hopping on the web to look at art on sites like DeviantArt or Tumblr, and to read an unfathomable number of stories on sites like Archiveofourown or Fanfiction.net. I could lay in bed with my phone and plow through a 100,000-word fic in a day or two.
So while there is plenty of research showing that simply reading on a screen can impair our ability to remember and process language, our comprehension is also predicated on how we use the internet and in what form we view content.
I compare my experience looking at art on DeviantArt to the experience of looking at art on, say, Instagram. On DeviantArt, you could scroll through the front page or search a keyword or go into an artist's portfolio and you would first see several works in a grid, each piece reduced to the size of a thumbnail. You selected which piece looked most interesting from afar and then you had to click on it to see it in full-size. When you did click it, Deviantart would take you to the piece's own page, where you could see it fully, zoom in, read the author's description—which would sometimes be a quick note on materials used, or a long update on the artist's life and work—and read through the comments. It was more akin to the experience of visiting a museum, where you can choose to approach the piece you wanted to see more clearly, and you could witness it with minimal distractions because of your closeness. You could strike up a conversation with the stranger viewing it beside you, if you wanted.
On Instagram, art flies by too easily. In being infinitely scrollable, the app is designed to propel you to the next post, to deliver another dopamine hit. It encourages volume and breadth of content, not quality of time spent with it. The miniscule comments section under each post stands as a barrier to chatting and community-making around a piece. And even the phone-based nature of the app makes everything more fleeting and too easily digestible. The tiny screen, the mobility of it—you can scroll through art while walking down the street or in a few stolen moments at work.
When we digitize something—our thoughts, our art, our information—the screen becomes a medium just as any medium. But instead of the texture of the paper as we turn a page or the carefully designed soundscape that helps immerse us in a movie theater, internet media is flattened into the same 2D screen, the same gesture that allows us to move from one thing to the next—the scroll.
One of the psychological horrors of the internet, Carr writes, is its propensity for distraction. We are bombarded with ads (I would like to have a chat with the person at YouTube who decided midroll ads were acceptable) but also hypertext. Web authors credit claims using hyperlinks, and this is standard practice and etiquette, like endnotes in an academic article. But research has shown that every time we see a hyperlink, we instinctively make a micro-decision about that link—is it worth opening? And even the small moment of deciding to open it, right clicking, and opening the link in another tab steals brainpower away from the text we are reading and interferes with our comprehension and memory. And the article may have dozens of hyperlinks. (There were no hyperlinks in the 100,000-word fanfictions I read and I will no longer be using hyperlinks throughout my posts for this reason).
At the same time, Carr brushes against something that I had never taken seriously before until I read Jaron Lanier's book, Who Owns the Future—that the internet makes it easier to kill context.
This is a sticking point for people who are worried about "cancel culture." But I am not talking about the moments when people in power are held to account for doing disgusting things in their past. I'm thinking more about the moments when a phrase or paragraph is lifted from someone's past without considering the context in which it was said. For example, a few years ago, Rep. Ilhan Omar was quoted as apparently making light of 9/11—the Trump Twitter team lambasted her and took a single line completely out of context. Or even historical figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote endless words throughout his lifetime, yet our internet age encourages the display of just a few—the most palatable, the ones that fit most easily in the Instagram square or in a 280-character tweet. We get Martin Luther King, Jr., sanitized, gradually scrubbed of the wider context of his life and work, because it is easy to copy and paste the lines that most appeal to us.
In Who Owns the Future, Jaron Lanier is very concerned about the death of context. He writes that in the remix culture of the internet, bits and bobs from other people's work can be pulled into other work freely—without the viewer of that second work being at all aware of the context and full body of work surrounding those bits and bobs. At first, I was skeptical, thinking about all the fanfiction and crossovers I've loved, even the magic of popular music that relies on samples—bits of music torn from their original song, inserted into another context. So many fun things can happen when we play with disparate elements. And isn't that what writing is about? Pulling bits and bobs from our experience and turning them into something our own?
But I also see the merit in Lanier's concern, and Carr's concern. There is a difference between hunting through catalogs of songs or digging through your personal musical memory (collected over months, years, or decades) for the perfect sample---versus writing an article or paper and just doing a quick google search and a control-F to find articles that support your ideas. As Carr writes, "The strip-mining of 'relevant content' replaces the slow excavation of meaning."
To be honest, I have done this in writing some of these blog posts. I have an idea that I've gathered over years of experiences and reading, and I just need to find a source to include to make sure that I've backed myself up. But this use of the internet deprives both me and the author of that text I cite—me, of perhaps learning something I didn't know or gaining a perspective alongside my own, and the author, of having the entirety of their argument and evidence engaged with seriously.
This made me reconsider the way I quote and incorporate others' ideas, and even how I wrote about Lanier's book, because I was worried that I'd misrepresent his ideas in exactly the way he feared. I began thinking critically about how I use other's words, and what I owe to the authors I cite.
I often say that in my ideal world, I can exist in a cabin in the woods with a bunch of music, a bunch of books, and some pen and paper, without the instant gratification of Instagram and Google. I truly believe that the internet is maybe not rotting my brain, but changing it in a way I dislike, and that unplugging would make me happier and healthier. I can feel the difference when I unplug.
But I also want to acknowledge that The Shallows, and most of the books and articles I've read that dig critically into the internet, are by white men, usually those with established careers in their field or as writers. That is worthy of noting—besides general calls for diversity in publications—because the internet is bound up in privilege.
I can dream about giving up technology, and sometimes actually do it, because I am less dependent on many of the advantages that tech provides. Convenience. Communication. Education. Tech CEOs can afford to send their kids to tech-free summer camps, and they can ignore work emails after hours.
But for the "precariat"—those that aren't poor or deprived, but still live paycheck to paycheck—the internet is an essential tool to get by. It's the source of side hustles, from freelancing to dog-walking gigs. It's a source of convenience, and when you are short on time and money, it is harder to sacrifice convenience for the sake of some intellectual ideal.
And as someone who is entering the job market with ideals, with hopes to work in a creative industry or at a nonprofit, I have been bombarded with narratives of precarity both caused and warded off by the web. The same internet that has decimated the news industry and print media, that has gig-ified so many industries and kneecapped stable employment, is the same internet that many depend on to network in their industry, to build their careers and personal "brands." After deleting my Twitter this summer, I recreated my account after my supervisor told me that it's a great source for job alerts and industry news.
Urging people to disconnect in this very precarious world, where being on Twitter could be the difference between finding a job posting and not, connecting with a future employer or not, is tone-deaf. Never mind the advantages that true access to technology and connection would provide to those who can't make ends meet.
My relationship with technology is fraught because while I resent it and its effects on me, I can also see that a great deal of my skills and opportunities and thus my privilege are rooted in early exposure. My mother would loan me her laptop for hours at a time, allowing me to type up the stories I held in my head. For Christmas one year, I received a digital tablet that allowed me to make art on my computer. Writing this post even reminded me of what may have been my first try at graphic design—in elementary school, I made my own little brochure newsletter about Tamagotchis. I printed the trifold in full color, with images I'd pulled from Google, and gave them out to my friends.
These early experiences with technology have shaped the creator I am today, working mostly in digital media. The instincts for web platforms that I developed in my early teens has translated to a flexibility that gives me confidence in learning almost any new program—a huge asset in the digital job market.
As I work at the library, I am becoming increasingly aware of how I take this instinct for granted. I often help elderly people fill out online forms or access their accounts. I've seen one patron cautiously click the new tab button and then smile triumphantly, having successfully carried out a task that I do dozens, if not hundreds of times a day sometimes. This, while navigating the labyrinthine worlds of government assistance, tax paperwork, or even just reaching their loved ones on Facebook.
So I recognize the privilege that I have with technology and all the gains I have made through my skills with it. Yet that doesn't change my feelings about the internet and its role in my life.
At the risk of sounding cliche, Carr's book has made me be more mindful about the way I use the web, both as a user and a creator. If I agree with Carr and share his concerns, yet can't fully divorce myself from the internet, then I must be more intentional about how I create in digital spaces; how I engage with others' work through web-based tools. And, I must be careful about how I interact with the world at large, when my experience of it is often mediated by those same tools.
Thanks for reading, take care, and talk to you soon,
Mia
