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A review by studeronomy
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
informative
medium-paced
4.0
The Shallows was ten years old in 2020, when the second edition was published. Now the second edition is four years old. Those fourteen years have produced copious research that confirms Nicholas Carr’s speculations in 2010—and a lot of this book is speculation, informed speculation, but more predictive than descriptive: at least when it deals with the effects of digital media on the gray matter between our ears. That gray matter spent billions of years to reach its current degree of complexity, and that (Carr argues) is something that technology can never replicate.
To make his argument about digital media, Carr relies on potential analogies between the proliferation of that media and earlier periods of seismic change within the distribution of information (through technology), which in turn rewires how our brains process (and adapt to) that new information technology. These analogies—Carr’s historical analysis, supplemented by some (perhaps cherry-picked) data on the human brain and technology—are the most interesting part of the book. The invention of writing, the invention of the printed press, and the proliferation of mass media in the 20th century: each offer an historical analogy to our present moment.
But Carr raises the stakes because, whereas earlier “intellectual technologies” heightened our grasp on a specific mode of reality, the digital revolution has given us multi-modal access to pretty much the whole of reality itself. This makes digital technology uniquely disruptive, a reality that is probably irreversible since the invention of the smartphone. Can you think of a single relationship
between yourself and the world outside you that hasn’t been altered by your smartphone, that isn't somehow mediated through your device? The fact that most of this book was written before most people owned smartphones is…pretty remarkable.
Throughout The Shallows, Carr pays tribute to Marshall McLuhan, the spiritual father of this book. I love that McLuhan is getting more attention from public intellectuals in recent years, intellectuals who read beyond the simple “medium is the message” cliché. I mean, I could have this wrong because I haven’t read a ton of McLuhan—maybe I know nothing of his work, maybe I think his whole fallacy is wrong, and how I got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing. But I think I “get” McLuhan, and The Shallows is a fine, alarming tribute to him.
To make his argument about digital media, Carr relies on potential analogies between the proliferation of that media and earlier periods of seismic change within the distribution of information (through technology), which in turn rewires how our brains process (and adapt to) that new information technology. These analogies—Carr’s historical analysis, supplemented by some (perhaps cherry-picked) data on the human brain and technology—are the most interesting part of the book. The invention of writing, the invention of the printed press, and the proliferation of mass media in the 20th century: each offer an historical analogy to our present moment.
But Carr raises the stakes because, whereas earlier “intellectual technologies” heightened our grasp on a specific mode of reality, the digital revolution has given us multi-modal access to pretty much the whole of reality itself. This makes digital technology uniquely disruptive, a reality that is probably irreversible since the invention of the smartphone. Can you think of a single relationship
between yourself and the world outside you that hasn’t been altered by your smartphone, that isn't somehow mediated through your device? The fact that most of this book was written before most people owned smartphones is…pretty remarkable.
Throughout The Shallows, Carr pays tribute to Marshall McLuhan, the spiritual father of this book. I love that McLuhan is getting more attention from public intellectuals in recent years, intellectuals who read beyond the simple “medium is the message” cliché. I mean, I could have this wrong because I haven’t read a ton of McLuhan—maybe I know nothing of his work, maybe I think his whole fallacy is wrong, and how I got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing. But I think I “get” McLuhan, and The Shallows is a fine, alarming tribute to him.