Nicholas Carr's new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, is getting a lot of review attention. I think this is a hot issue, since not everyone agrees with Carr. So what follows is a collection of the recent reviews, from both sides of the Atlantic.First up, however, a brief interview in The New York Times:
OK, now some reviews, with brief excerpts.Stray Questions for: Nicholas Carr
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Joanie Simon Nicholas CarrNicholas Carr’s new book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” is reviewed in this Sunday’s book review.
What will this Web Q. and A. do to readers’ brains?
Not much, unless I say something remarkably memorable. What changes our brains is, on the one hand, repetition and, on the other hand, neglect. That’s why I believe the Net is having such far-reaching intellectual consequences. When we’re online, we tend to perform the same physical and mental actions over and over again, at a high rate of speed and in a state of perpetual distractedness. The more we go through those motions, the more we train ourselves to be skimmers and scanners and surfers. But the Net provides no opportunity or encouragement for more placid, attentive thought. What we’re losing, through neglect, is our capacity for contemplation, introspection, reflection — all those ways of thinking that require attentiveness and deep concentration.
What are you working on now?
My last three books have been about computers and the Internet, and at this point I think I’ve said all I have to say on those subjects. With one exception: I’d like to write an essay on the hyperlink. It’s such a small, simple thing, but it’s had a vast and incredibly complicated effect on our intellectual lives, and on our culture, over the last few years. I’d love to unpick the link.
I’m spending most of my time, though, casting about for an idea for my next book, so far without much success. My dream is to disappear for ten years and then reappear, in sandals and a beard, with a strange and wondrous thousand-page manuscript written in longhand. Something tells me that’s not going to happen.
What role does the Internet play in your writing life?
It plays a very beneficial role in helping me to do research efficiently, to find, very quickly and with a minimum of effort, relevant books, articles, and facts. At the same time, it plays a very damaging role in constantly disrupting my train of thought and leading me down endless rabbit holes. Robert Frost had a lover’s quarrel with the world. I’m having a lover’s quarrel with the Net.
What have you been reading or recommending lately?
I’m currently making my third attempt to read David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” all the way through, and this time I plan to succeed. I quote, in “The Shallows,” some advice that Wallace gave to college students a couple of years before he died. “Learning how to think,” he said, “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” Those words strike me as being worthy of contemplation.
New York Times: Our Cluttered Minds
By Jonah Lehrer
For Carr, the analogy is obvious: The modern mind is like the fictional computer. “I can feel it too,” he writes. “Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” While HAL was silenced by its human users, Carr argues that we are sabotaging ourselves, trading away the seriousness of sustained attention for the frantic superficiality of the Internet. As Carr first observed in his much discussed 2008 article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” the mere existence of the online world has made it much harder (at least for him) to engage with difficult texts and complex ideas. “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words,” Carr writes, with typical eloquence. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
This is a measured manifesto.
Boston Globe: The Internet ate my brain
Nicholas Carr says that our online lifestyle threatens to make us dumber. But resistance may not be futile
By Wen Stephenson
Sven Birkerts must be smiling, grimly. Author of the bestselling 1994 cri de coeur “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age,’’ now editor of the journal Agni at Boston University, Birkerts saw it coming. He raised the alarm on the intellectual and cultural effects of digital media long before Google’s corporate motto, “Don’t be evil,’’ took on an Orwellian tone. In fact, before
Well, he does now.
Technology writer Nicholas Carr’s buzzworthy new book, “The Shallows,’’ marshalls recent research to show, essentially, that Birkerts was right. The Internet works on our brains in such a way that we are in danger of losing our capacity for deep, sustained reading and thought — along with all the cognitive benefits. The Gutenberg mind is morphing into the Google mind.
Wall Street Journal: So Many Links, So Little Time
Try not to check your email before you get to the end of this sentence. See? That wasn't so bad.
John Horgan
While toiling over what you are now reading, I scanned my three email accounts dozens of times and wrote a handful of emails; I responded on my cellphone to a score of text messages from my girlfriend and kids; I checked the balance of my bank account to see if a promised payment had arrived . . . and so on.
Yet I'm relatively unwired. I don't do Twitter, Facebook or Skype. And I did all this digital darting hither and thither even though I found the subject I was supposed to be writing about—Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows"—quite absorbing. And disturbing. We all joke about how the Internet is turning us, and especially our kids, into fast-twitch airheads incapable of profound cogitation. It's no joke, Mr. Carr insists, and he has me persuaded.
Bloomberg Businessweek: 'The Shallows': Is the Net Fostering Stupidity?
Nicholas Carr's new book faults Google for being "in the business of distraction" and Twitter for being neurological heroin
The Good: Citing examples, Carr makes a persuasive case that the vast amount of information we process has a deleterious effect on our lives.
The Bad: While he offers arguments about the Internet's negative effects on our lives, the author does not propose any solutions.
The Bottom Line: Carr's book is significant for calling our attention to the fact that the Internet's profound impact on lives is not all for the good.
Chicago Tribune: As Lit Fest nears, a query: What's the future of books?
Julia Keller
Another reason for book lovers not to throw in the towel quite yet is "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" (Norton), by Nicholas Carr, a quietly eloquent retort to those who claim that digital culture is harmless — who claim, in fact, that we're getting smarter by the minute just because we can plug in a computer and allow ourselves to get lost in the funhouse of endless hyperlinks.
"The Net," Carr muses mournfully, "is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
The New Republic: The Uses of Half-True Alarms
Todd Gitlin
Carr is not shy about plunging headlong into extravagant claims. “The computer screen bulldozes our doubts with its bounties and conveniences.” “We become mindless consumers of data.” “The strip-mining of ‘relevant content’ replaces the slow excavation of meaning.” Perhaps aware of this propensity, at other times Carr pulls back from the brink with weasel-word conditionals such as “may well be,” as in: “The consequences [of multitasking online] for our intellectual lives may prove ‘deadly.’” Well, yes—but whatever may prove deadly may also not prove deadly.So Carr, alert as well as alarmed, confronts himself as well as his reader with the classic smoke-fire problem. His alarms come clanging on almost every page. What to make of them? They cannot be dismissed as the mutterings of an obsolescent graybeard—Carr is in his early forties. To his credit, moreover, he pauses to address some objections to his line of argument—for example, the striking, well-established finding that IQ scores almost everywhere have been rising for a century while the means of distraction have been multiplying exponentially. “If we’re so dumb,” he italicizes, “why do we keep getting smarter?”
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