Carr's The Shallows - the Internet is changing us

A summary of:

Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. W.W. Norton & Company: New York.

(Be Warned: The Internet is changing us)

The main message Carr sends in this new book is that our technology – indeed, every new medium – changes us. This is not a new idea. McLuhan, whom he cites frequently, is famous for saying that the “medium is the message”, alluding to the “transformative power of new communication technologies” (2). But this aphorism was also, according to Carr, a warning “about the threat the power poses – and the risk of being oblivious to the threat” (2). Carr suggests that often times, the introduction of a new technology sparks debate about the wrong thing, namely the content the technology conveys. Carr writes: “What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it – and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society” (3). Just as “When a carpenter picks up a hammer, the hammer becomes, so far as his brain is concerned, part of his hand” (208), when we use the Internet, the Internet becomes an extension of our brains.

So how does the Internet change us? Well, some cognitive skills are strengthened as we engage with the Web. These include things like “hand-eye coordination, reflex response, and the processing of visual cues” (139). As a 2003 Nature study shows, game players are more deft as shifting their visual focus and identify more items in their visual fields. The authors of this study concluded that “‘although video-game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing’” (139). A similar argument has been made by Jane McGonigal (see post). But the question is, how useful are these skills in a age when computers no longer exist? If we are training ourselves to be better and better at using computers – i.e. thinking like computers – aren’t we getting less and less good at NOT using computers? (Of course, not only are their cognitive tradeoffs to be considered with our increased Web use, there are negative psychological consequences to this as well – which is the topic of my next blog.)

Another thing that becomes clear in reading this book is that the tenets that underpin technology are self-reinforcing. For example, Carr identifies the Internet as one of many “intellectual technologies,” in that they seek to “extend or support our mental powers” (44). In using the Internet, we tacitly accept the correctness of this endeavor; and the more we use the Internet, the more we come to value its cause. Nowhere is this more evident than in Google itself. Carr quotes Richard Koman, who said that Google “‘has become a true believer in its own goodness, a belief which justifies its own set of rules regarding corporate ethics, anti-competition, customer service and its place in society’” (164). Here we see in action the reshuffling of the hierarchy of value system. Whereas once honesty and community etc. may have been at the top, here they are subordinated to freedom of information. (For evidence of this, note the many lawsuits against Google’s Book Search and their dismissive, cavalier attitude, Google’s Eric Schmidt saying: “‘Imagine the cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible volumes into one vast index, every word of which is searchable by anyone, rich or poor, urban or rural, First World or Third, en toute langue – and all, of course, entirely for free’” (162).) The Google Book Project vaults “data” and “information” to the top of our priorities, asserting yet again “the machine” over “the garden” (167). It is little surprise, then, that Westerners see their great philanthropic mission as being the increased access to information for supposedly ‘disadvantaged’ populations (e.g. the well-meaning but entirely misguided One Laptop Per Child Initiative; proving that poverty is measured in diminished informational resources, rather than diminished social bonds, happiness, etc.).

What is even more worrying – and frankly insulting – is the assertion by these intellectual technologies (the Web more so than others, I would argue) that we would be “‘better off’ if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by artificial intelligence” (173). When societies were becoming literate, there was similar debate about the impact it would have on people’s minds. Socrates feared that writing would teach people to become less dependent on their own memory, and remember things “not from within themselves, but by means of external marks” (177). And he was right. But this is ever more true with the Internet, which encourages people to completely offload their memory to the Web, to save up precious brain space. But Socrates’ wariness should prove to us just how far our line in the sand has moved, how much we have been changed by our technology. If books were at one time anathema to us, and now many of us see nothing wrong with deferring by default to Google’s search results, it should suggest to us that perhaps we need to rethink the seemingly unquestionable sense of the mission of intellectual technologies.

Another way that technology changes us is that it homogenizes us culturally, so that we lose all rich, human ways of doing as we replace them with specifically technological ways of doing. (This is another reason for my aversion to One Laptop Per Child – pushing Western values to non-Western countries.) Carr writes, “Culture is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as ‘the world’s information.’ It’s more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers” (197). He quotes Richard Foreman, who argues that offloading memory threatens both the depth of culture and the depth of self: “‘I come from a tradition of Western culture,’ he wrote, ‘in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.’ But now, he continued, ‘I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.’ As we are drained of our ‘inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,’ Foreman concluded, we risk turning into ‘pancake people – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button’” (196).

The final way that technology changes us is that we design our societies to function around its capabilities; or as Weizenbaum says, “Such technologies become part of ‘the very stuff out of which man builds his world” (206). Carr quotes Weizenbaum futher: “‘The computer was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society in the post-war period and beyond,’ Weizenbaum argued; ‘its enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most “progressive” elements of American government, business, and industry made it a resource essential to society’s survival in the form that the computer itself had been instrumental in shaping’” (207). Carr explains further: “Comptuers would come to mediate the activities that define people’s everyday lies – how they learn, how they think, how they socialize. What the history of intellectual technologies shows us, he warned, is that ‘the introduction of computers into some complex human activities may constitute an irreversible commitment.’ Our intellectual and social lives may, like our industrial routines, come to reflect the form that the computer imposes on them” (207). Just as Carr warned from the beginning: “The computer screen bulldozes our doubts with its bounties and conveniences. It is so much our servant that it would seem churlish to notice that it is also our master” (4). This is because, “Once (206) adopted , they can never be abandoned, at least not without plunging society into ‘great confusion and possibly utter chaos.’ An intellectual technology, he wrote, ‘becomes an indispensible component of any structure once it is to thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure’” (207).

My concern is this: Everything we know as humans (from our spiritual traditions, social taboos, etc.) should tell us that we should resist the mesmerizing effect of these intellectual technologies, and yet we sacrifice these values because adopting them is easier to do. But like every empire, the Age of the Computer will one day fall (just as cars will as fossil fuels dry up and nuclear power cannot supply enough energy to the grid to provide for an electric car society), and when that comes, I’m afraid we’ll be very ashamed of having eschewed our human values for technological ones.

I want to end on a more positive note. The real question about the power of technology should be this: How do we use it to our advantage? Can we see hope in the transformative affects of media? Firstly, as Langdon Winner pointed out, “technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning” (47). To us, this should indicate that if we design responsibly, we can have a huge impact on our very worldview. So just as the mechanical clock “helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man” (44), it is possible that a spiritualized cyberspace might create an altogether different man, perhaps an incarnation that’s more sensitive to issues of human/nature harmony. And secondly, if we recognize that the addition of a medium affects all other media – in McLuhan’s words, ‘It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them’ (89) – then if we create a new Internet, it has the power to affect the Internet we have now. In other words, we are not in competition with previous, highly popular incarnations of the Web. By innovating cyberspace creatively, we may ameliorate the negative impacts of the Web (as we know it today) by merely opening eyes to an alternative.