# Summary ## My initial thoughts The Shallows is an excellent book. It challenges the status quo surrounding the internet; that it is a boon to humanity, something to be embraced and deeply embedded into society. While the internet does have its many fantastic uses, the author [[Nicholas Carr]] builds a strong case for the internet having a deep and detrimental impact on the minds and brains of those who use it: - It lowers our ability to store information in long-term memory - It decreases our comprehension of the material we consume on it by presenting us with a bring, busy concoction of distractions - It decreases our ability to focus for long periods of time, presenting us with hyperlinks to every corner of the internet Carr begins by exploring how plastic the brain is ([[Neuroplasticity|Neuroplastic]], setting the ground for how the internet is able to literally rewire the pathways in our brains. He also explores how other tools that humanity has invented have deeply shaped how we act and think, mainly discussing the clock and the written word. So 1. The brain is flexibility, malleable, plastic, down to the level of neurons. 2. Powerful, culture-changing tools can and have changed how we think. 3. The internet is one such tool, but it has a dark side that often changes brains for the worse, by making us less able to focus and read a long piece of text ## Introduction to the Second Edition Carr first published The Shallows in 2010. 'When I wrote this book ten years ago, the prevailing view of the internet was sunny, often ecstatically so. We admired the wizards of Silicon Valley and trusted them to act in our bests interests. *We took it on faith that computer hardware and software would make our lives better, our minds sharper.*' He cites a 2010 Pew Research survey of 400 'prominent thinkers', more than 80% of whom agreed that "*By 2020, people's use of the internet will have enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information, they become smarter and make better choices." Carr writes '**The year 2020 has arrived. We're not smarter we're not making better choices.**' The Shallows explores why we were mistaken about the internet. 'When it comes to the quality of our thoughts and judgements, the amount of info a comms medium supplies is less important than the way the medium presents the information and the way, in turn, our minds take it in. The brain's capacity is not unlimited. The passageway from perception to understanding is narrow.' "**When the brain is overloaded by stimuli, as it usually is when we're peering into a network-connected computer screen, attention splinters, thinking becomes superficial, and memory suffers. We become less reflective and more impulsive. Far from enhenacing human intelligence, I argue, the Internet degrades it. **" ## Prologue: The Medium is the Message In 1964, Marshall McLuhan published 'Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.' In it, he prophesied the *dissolution of the linear mind* due to 'electric media' such as phone, radio, and TV. He coined the phrase [[The medium is the message]]. Not even he could have foreseen how pervasive of a medium the internet has become - in our workplaces, our homes, our bedrooms, our pockets. ## Chap 1: Hal and Me Carr describes his sense that the internet is changing how his mind works: "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. My mind isn't going - so far as I can tell - but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to. I feel it most strongly when I'm reading... my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle." He writes that the net has become his all-purpose medium, that does have incredible advantages. But these boons have a price - since [[The medium is the message]], the internet is changing the process of thought. **And the internet would seem to be chipping away at our capacity for concentration and contemplation, even when we are not using it.** One professor of English who teaches students of literature says "I can't get my students to read whole books anymore." The internet reduces our ability to think linearly: "Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping busts - the faster. the better." This linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science, and society, for the last five hundred years since the invention of [[The Printing Press]]. "It may soon be yesterday's mind." Carr notes that despite libraries consistent thousands of books on "long, narrow corridors of stacks", he doesn't recall feeling "the anxiety that's symptomatic of what we today call 'information overload.'" > 💬 There was something calming in the reticence Carr was in college when the first huge, room-sized computers were built. When he entered work, he had a basic computer for word processing. Then the internet came along, then digital books, then social media accounts. Technology made a slow and seemingly innocent crawl into his life. In 2007, he began to notice that the internet was beginning to change his habits and routines, and that his ability to pay attention to one thing was diminishing. He missed his old brain. ## Chap 2: The Vital Paths Carr writes about how [[Nietzsche]] was becoming ill and was forced to curtail his writing. He was rescued by an early typewriter, the Writing Ball. One of his closest friends noticed, a change in his writing: "Nietzsche's prose had become tighter, more telegraphic. There was a new forcefulness to it, too, as though the machine's power - it's 'iron' - was, through some mysterious metaphysical mechanism, being transferred into the words it pressed into the page." To which Nietzsche replied "You are right. Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of or thoughts." Carr goes on to discuss [[Neuroplasticity]] to show that [[the internet is capable of changing the adult brain]]. He also discusses how [[Our brains come to see external tools as being part of our bodies.]] Carr goes even further and explores evidence that [[Imagining yourself doing an action can rewire your brain as if you really did it]]. Continuing to set the groundwork for how the internet and neuroplasticity interact, Carr discusses [[The downsides of neuroplasticity]] ## Chap 3: Tools of the Mind In this chapter, Carr explores how human tools and inventions change the way our minds work. He explores how this happened with the clock, the map, and the advent of writing. [[Our intellectual maturation can be seen in the way we draw pictures and maps]], both on an individual and societal level. Maps helped to propagate abstract thinking. Carr moves on to the clock: "What the map did for space - translate a natural phenomenon into an artificial and intellectual conception of that phenomenon - another technology, the mechanical clock, did for time." [[How clocks and time keeping changed the way we think]] Carr explores ![[The Four Categories of Technology]], exploring how "**Every technology is an expression of human will.** Through our tools, we seek to expand our power and control over our circumstances - over nature, over time and distance, over one another." He writes that although any of these four kinds of tools can influence our thinking and perspective, the fourth groups intellectual technologies, have the greatest and most lasting power over how and what we think. "*They are our most intimate tools, the ones we use for self-expression, for shaping personal and public identity, and for cultivating relations with others.*" Every technology embodies an ethic (the message that it transmits into our minds or cultures), and it is rarely recognized by its inventors as they are usually so intent on solving a particular problem or scientific dilemma that they don't see its broader implications - and these implications are not always obvious initially. The same goes for the users of technology, who are more concerned wit its practical benefits. Carr discusses [[The Deterministic Versus Instrumentalistic Views of Technology]] - the former see technology as an autonomous force outside man's control that is the primary influencing factor of our history, the latter see technology as neutral artifacts, subservient to our conscious wishes. Carr argues that in the long run, the deterministic view has the most credibility; we likely didn't choose to use maps or clocks, or choose to take on their long-term side-effects. ^c76b4a Political scientist Langdon Winner writes "If the experience of modern society shows us anything, it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning." > 💡 Much of the routine we follow in our lives has been dictated by technologies that came into use long before we were born. Carr says that the deterministic view is not 100% the case - our use of tools has been heavily influenced by economic, political, and demographic consideration - but that technological progress does have its own logic, and that this logic is not always "consistent with the intentions or wishes of the toolmakers and tool users." > 💡Technological advances often mark turning points in history. ### Trying to examine the effect of tools on the mind Carr writes: "What's been harder to discern is the influence of technologies, particularly intellectual technologies, on the functioning of people's brains. We can see the products of thought - works of art, scientific discoveries, symbols preserved on documents - but not the thought itself. *There are plenty of fossilized bodies, but there are no fossilized minds.*" ^5d066c New technology and scientific advances now let us peer into the human mind. (Ruairi: No doubt these technologies too will change the way we think; how might our thinking change now that we can think about the way we think?) Our use of technology has strengthened some neural circuits and weakened others; reinforced some mental traits and letting others fade away. Carr writes that "[[Neuroplasticity]] provides the missing link to our understanding of how informational media and other intellectual technologies have exerted their influence over the development of human civilization and helped to guide, at a biological level, the history of human consciousness." The basic form of the human brain has not changed much in the last 40,000 years - evolution moves slowly. But the way humans think and act has changes massively in that time span. H. G. Wells observed of mankind: "His social life, his habits, have changed completely, have even undergone reversion and reversal, while his heredity seems to have changed very little if at all, since the late Stone Age." [[Neuroplasticity]] hold the key to this puzzle - what we do and how we do it, be it consciously or unconsciously - changes, moment by moment, the structure of our brains, the structure of our neurons and synapses. And these changes are passed on to our children through our own behavior, the education system we put them through, and the media we exposed them to. > 💡 Everything we do changes the structure of our brains. And technology has consistently had a huge impact on our behaviors, our routines, and our actions - hence, technology has changed the structure of our brains. Technology even changes how we use language and metaphors to describe nature; we speak of 'mapping' our lives and our so pai spheres; we think of our bodies, and the universe itself, as operating 'like clockwork'. [[Descartes]] wrote "Doubtless when the swallows come in spring, they operate like clocks." ### Reading and writing as tools The map and clock changes laughable indirectly by suggesting new metaphors for describing nature. Other intellectual technologies change language more directly and deeply by altering how we speak, or listen, or read, or write. Carr writes: "**And because language is the primary vessel of conscious thought for humans, particularly higher forms of thought, the technologies that restructure language tend to exert the strongest influence over our intellectual lives. The history of language is also a history of the mind.** Classical scholar Walter J. One said 💡 " Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciouness, and never more than when they affect the word." [[Language is innate, reading and writing are not]], they must be learned and practiced. [[Different types of alphabets and languages create different structures in the brain]] [[In a purely oral culture, thinking is governed by the capacity of human memory]] [[Language changes the way we think]] While oral communication may have had a level of emotional involvement that written communication does not, the former was more shallow and the latter "liberated knowledge from the bounds of individual memory and freed language from the rhythmical and formulaic structures required to support memorization and recitation. It opened to the mind new frontiers of thought and expression." "Oral cultures could produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche". But literacy "is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explication understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself". The ability to write is "utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. **Writing heightens consciousness. **" ## Chap 4: The Deepening Page #WorkInProgress Summary: access to a large volume of books changed the way our brains worked. People could now consume knowledge in private, both for pleasure, scholarly reading, and practical reference, Reading became a means of personal instruction and improvement. "Writing for the first time, was aimed as much at the eye as the ear." Readers developed specialized brain regions for the rapid deciphering of text. As this deciphering becomes automatic with practice, the brain can dedicate more resources to interpretation of meaning - to **deep reading.** Readers became more attentive, replacing their natural tendency for distractedness with the ability to focus for longer and longer periods. > 💡"To read a book was to practice *an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single static object. [Readers] had to train their brains to ignore everything else going on around them, **to resist the urge to let their focus skip from one sensory cue to another.** THey had to forge or strengthen **the neural links needed to counter their instinctive distractedness, applying greater ' top-down control' over their attention.'*** 'The ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted,' writes Vaughan Bell, a research psychologist at King's College London, represents a *'strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development.'*" (Ruairi: This helps to shed light on [[The Technology-Productivity Link and Decline]]; focus is not our natural state, it has to be learned, And now it is being undone by the internet. ) Many had already developed a capacity for sustained attention before the alphabet came along - hunters, craftsmen, etc. What was remarkable about reading was that deep concentration was combined with the highly active and efficient deciphering of text and interpretation of meaning. **People thought as deeply as they read, making their own associations and fostering new ideas.** Carr writes: "Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn't involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind. *Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions.* That was - and is - the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading." (Ruairi: If people can't read a book for half an hour, how are they going to do any kind of focused work for 8 hours a day?) The development of writing, with phonetic letters and spaces between words, liberated the writer as well as the reader; they now relied less on personal scribes, took up their own writing in private, and made their works more personal and adventurous. Writers could pursue unconventional, skeptical, heretical, and seditious writings, pushing the bounds of knowledge and culture. People were not likely to dictate erotic poetry to a scribe! Authors also gained the ability to revise and edit their works heavily, which altered the form and content of writing. Arguments became longer, clearer, more complex and more challenging. Paragraphs and chapters became commonplace. These changes had social consequences; universities began to stress private reading as an essential complement to classroom lectures. Libraries played more central roles in universities and cities. The number of books produced in the fifty years after the invention of the printing press equaled the number of books produced by European scribes during the preceding thousand years. People of modest means could assemble their own personal collection of books. As books proliferated, the English vocabulary went from a few thousand words to upwards of a million. Writers, competing for the eyes of readers, expressed their ideas and emotions with growing clarity, elegance, and originality. "The remarkable virtuosity displayed by new literary artists who managed to counterfeit taste, touch, smell, or sound in mere words required a heightened awareness and closer observation of sensory experience that was in turn passed on to readers." - [[Albert Einstein]] Writers were able to alter perception, thus enriching people's experience of the physical world outside of books. Readers became more contemplative, reflective, and imaginative, as thanks to [[Neuroplasticity]] we know that neural circuits developed for one task (contemplative reading) can be put to other uses as well (general contemplation in day-to-day life). > 💬 "When transcribed to a page, a stream of consciousness becomes literally and linear. " The literary ethic became the ethic of the historian, philosopher, and crucially of the scientist. ## Chap 5: A Medium of the Most General Nature ### Rise of the internet The internet differs from most other types of mass-media in that it is **bi-directional**; we can send content as well as receive it. Even as speedier internet connections have allowed us to do more online with each minute spent on it, the time we spend on it is rising; by 2009 adults in North American were spending an average of 12 hours a week online, up from 6 hours in 2005. If you only count adults with internet access, this jumps to 17. For young adults, it was 19 hours or more. Children between two and eleven were using it on average 11 hours a week in 2009. An international survey of 27,500 adults in 2008 found that most people spend 30% of their leisure time online, with the Chinese up to 44%. Given the level to which the internet and internet-enabled devices have infiltrated our lives, we never really have to disconnect from it; from each other, from news, from distraction after distraction. People constantly use the internet to try and dispell their boredom. The time we have spent on the internet has risen while time spent watching TV has generally held the same or increased. A 2009 study by Ball State University's Center for Media Design found that most Americans, regardless of age, spent at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a TV, computer screen, or mobile phone, and often two or three of them at the same time. ### Decline of print media What has declined as internet usage grows is our reading of print publications, such as newspapers, magazines, and books. ### Changing the format of other media "A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them." - [[Marshal McLuhan]] We see this today; Carr writes: > 💡"When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image. *It not only dissolves the medium's physical form; it injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has obsorbed.* **All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.**" Reading print material involves different actions to scrolling through a web document. Reading draws on our sense of touch as well as sight; the shift from screen to paper influences the degree of attention we devote to the material and our depth of immersion in it. This effect works both ways; traditional media formats are also changing the way they present media to try and keep up with the internet as it eats into their profitability. Many of them are chopping up their products to fit the attention span of online consumers: - Snippets of TV shows are distributed online - Excerpts of radio programs are offered as podcasts or streams - Individual magazine and news articles are circulated in isolation - Pages of books are displayed on Amazon and Google Books - Music albums are split up and songs sold separately, then broken down to even smaller parts for ringtones - Some magazines have changed their layouts to mimic or echo the internet; shortened articles, summaries of articles, pages crowded with easy-to-browse blurbs - Text crawls are common place on news channels **"Even the experiences we have in the real world are coming to be mediated by networked computers"** says Carr: - Musical and theatrical performances sometimes encourage audience members to vote for songs via their phones and to share the experience on twitter. *"It was less passive than just sitting there and listening to music"* commented an attendee of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. - Libraries are increasingly becoming more and more populated by computers and the internet. *"The predominant sound in the modern library is the tapping of keys, not the turning of pages.""* says Carr, ### Disadvantages of hyperlinks Links don't merely point us to related content; they **propel** us toward them. They *encourage us to dip in and out of the content as we please, breaking up our attention.* (Ruairi: This is detrimental to focus as [[It takes 25 minutes to fully focus on a task after switching from another]]). Hyperlinks are designed to grab our attention; their value as a navigational tool is inextricably tied to the distraction they cause. So they are not merely a new, neutral take on print-based navigational aids like citations and footnotes. ^678790 They take advantage of [[The Habit Cycle]]; we see them and think that something better or more interesting might lie beyond it, and our desire for the reward kicks off the action of clicking it. ### Disadvantages of search Online search is a variation on older navigational aids like tables of contents and indexes. But as with hyperlinks, it has negative effects; the ease and availability of search makes it much easier to jump between digital content. Search also fragments online works; Carr writes: "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 searchinf for at the moment, while providing little incentive for taking in the 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. **" ### Disadvantages of the multi-media format The internet further fragments content and disrupts our attention by often presenting more than one media format on the page; navigational tools, text, video or audio, advertisements, 'widgets', etc. We also have access to every other piece of software or app on the device we are using, all of which are competing for our attention. As blogger Cory Doctorow says, we are plugged into "*an ecosystem of interruption technologies.*" (Ruairi: Discipline is also a factor here. I have mitigated some of these disadvantages through focused effort and specific changes to my devices (e.g. hiding the app doc on my Mac by default), but even then I don't think I have eliminated them entirely) ### Trap of Convenience meets Digital Binging People are pulled in by both the ease of use ([[The Convenience Bias]]) and their desire to binge on digital content, a desire that is often driven by social needs. So the internet is not quite changing our mental habits against our will; people are using technology in this way because they like it. Unfortunately, these disadvantages aren't immediately obvious. ## Chap 6: The Very Image of a Book ### Benefit of books over devices ![[Benefits of physical books over digital devices]] ![[Benefits of digital books over physical books]] ### Ignoring the issues with the medium An SVP of HarperStudio (HarperCollins) said "We need to take advantage of the medium and create something dynamic to enhance the experience. I want links and behind the scenes extras and narration and videos and conversation." But this would no longer be a 'book'; as Carr says: "As soon as you inject a book with links and connect it to the web - as soon as you 'extent' and 'enhance' it and make it 'dynamic' - you change what it is and you change, as well, the experience of reading it. **An e-book is no more a book than an online newspaper is a newspaper.**" Historian David Bell, having read an e-book, said "A few clicks, and the text duly appears on my computer screen. I start reading, but while the book is well written and informative, I find it remarkably hard to concentrate. I scroll back and forth, search for key words, and interrupt myself even more often than usual to refill my coffee cup, check my e-mail, check the news, re-arrange files in my desk drawer. Eventually I get through the book and am glad to have done so. But a week later I find it remarkably hard to remember what I have read." ### Making books more like a website Transferring a book to an electronic device connected to the internet turns it into something like a website: - It loses its "edges" and dissolves into the vastness of the internet - It's words become embedded in all the other distractions of the device - Its links and other digital enhancements propel the reader away from the main text; **the linearity of the printed book is shattered.** CEO of O'Reilly Media (American publisher of technology books), Tim O'Reilly, wrote of a book about Twitter created using PowerPoint: "We've long been interested in exploring how the online medium changes the presentation, narrative, and structure of the book. Most books *still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle*. Here, we've used a web-like model of standalone pages, each of which can be read alone, or at most in a group of two or three. *The 'modular architecture' reflects the way people's reading practices have changed as they've adapted to online text.* **The web provides countless lessons about how books need to change when they move online." Ruairi: O'Reilly is at least aware of the differences brought about by the new medium, but he thinks these differences will make a better reading experience; possibly partially because he is in the business of publishing books about technology. I disagree, I think the web provides countless lessons on how and why **not** to change books! Major publisher Simon & Schuster have begun publishing e-books with embedded videos called "vooks"; one executive said "*You can't just be linear anymore with your text.*" These changes are subtle and will develop slowly. ### Adapting books to search engines Perhaps authors will face pressure to tailor their words to search engines, just as bloggers and content writes already do. Steven Johnson wrote: "Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors. Individual paragraphs will be accompanies by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank." ### Changing writing and language itself Given how the advent of alphabets, reading and writing, and books changed language itself, it is likely that the internet will have deep effects on our way of reading and writing, and hence on language itself. We already see text talk creeping into every day language. We saw earlier how the advent of easier-to-use alphabets and ways of writing allowed writers to do away with scribes and write in private, allowing them more freedom of expression and the ability to experiment, leading to an increased vocabulary and an increase in the flexibility and expressiveness of language. *It is possible that, as the medium of writing now changes, from private pages to communal screens and spaces, writers will adapt to this and tailor their work for 'groupiness', where people read mainly for the sake of feeling like they belong;* **social concerns may override literary ones.** (Ruairi: This is similar to [[Calling Bullshit]] discussing how many people on social media share posts moreso to signal the group/party/ideology they subscribe to, as opposed to caring what the content is actually about.) [[Jeff Bezos]] once said "It's so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as a book and improve on it. And maybe even change the way people read." Carr argues there is no maybe about it - reading and writing has already been changed by the internet. Carr believes books 'are in their cultural twilight.'' This shift can be seen in the comments made by many people in the world of reading, writing, and education. Carr writes *Some thinkers welcome the eclipse of the book and the literary mind it fostered. In a recent address to a group of teachers, Mark Federman, an education researcher at the University of Toronto, argued that literacy, as we’ve traditionally understood it, “is now nothing but a quaint notion, an aesthetic form that is as irrelevant to the real questions and issues of pedagogy today as is recited poetry—clearly not devoid of value, but equally no longer the structuring force of society.” * *The time has come, he said, for teachers and students alike to abandon the “linear, hierarchical” world of the book and enter the Web’s “world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity”—a world in which “the greatest skill” involves “discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux.” * ### Physical publishing is final, online publishing is indefinite As physical books are a permanent record once published, "The finality of the act of publishing has long instilled in the best and most conscientious writes and editors a desire, even an anxiety, to *perfect the works they produce.*" The internet and electronic text, allowing for indefinite revision, may alter writer's attitudes, lowering the pressure to achieve, or at least strive for, perfection. Carr gives the poignant example of the history of correspondence, writing that "*a personal letter written in, say, the nineteenth century bears little resemblance to a personal email or text message written today.* **Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence. **" ### Liberation VS Loss of Death Digitization of books is often seen as a liberating act, and it does bring benefits with it, but it is also likely weakening the depth of intellectual attachment between the lone reader and lone writer. ### 'The reading class' A group of Northwestern University professors wrote an article in 2005 in the 'Annual Review of Psychology' saying that the "era of mass [book] reading" was a brief "anomaly" in our intellectual history, and that "We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class." ### Multitasking is generally bad Multitasking is generally not a good thing, and this has been observed early on in the rise of computers: [[The world's first reactions to multitasking on computers]] ## Chap 7: The Juggler's Brain Carr now dives into further disadvantages of the internet. ### An overview of how the internet negatively alters our brains > 💬 "Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators, and web designers point to the same conclusion: **when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.** It's possibly to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it's possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that's not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards." > 💬 "One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain's plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would require our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. It's not just that *we tend to use the internet regularly, even obsessively.* **It's that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli - repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive - that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.** With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may will be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. At the very least, it's the most powerful that has come along since the book. " We are accessing our devices multiple times a day, often repeating the same tasks in succession, usually at high speed, in response to a range of cues across a range of senses, and we use a variety of physical actions to interact with our devices. This is prime habit-developing behavior. We are bombarded with photos and videos, hyperlinks, cursors that change depending on what we hover over, buttons that scream to be clicked, forms to be filled, etc etc etc. Multiple senses, engaged simultaneously and continuously. 💬 "The net also provides a high-speed system for delivering responses and rewards - 'positive reinforcements' in psychological terms - which encourages the repetition of both physical and mental actions." Think getting new info after clicking a link, getting quick replies by email, getting an instant list of relevant info after putting a keyword into Google, etc. The internet has us pressing virtual levels, like rats, dispensing pellets of social or intellectual nourishment. We become completely engrossed in and consumed by the medium, often oblivious to everything else around us. Ruairi: You've seen it many times (unless you're doing it yourself all the time): people attached to their phones like zombies, while sitting with friends and family, or walking, or cycling, or driving. No wonder people are walking into traffic and crashing their cars while distracted by their phones. ### The social aspect We often use the internet and our devices in a social context and this magnifies our investment and involvement in the medium even more, as our self-consciousness is being pulled into the interconnected system. This is even more true for teenagers, whose brains are also undergoing more change and moulding than adults. Psychotherapist Michael Hausauer wrote that teens and other young adults have "a terrific interest in knowing what's going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a *terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.*" [[Phantom Vibrations]] is a documented hallucination, experienced by 9 out of 10 teenagers in a study, where they think their phone beeps or vibrates when it didn't. ### Seize and scatter **The internet seizes our attention only to scatter it.** Swedish neuroscientist Terkel Klingberg wrote that we humans "want more information, more impressions, and more complexity." We tend to "seek out situations that demand concurrent performance or situations in which [we] are overwhelmed with information." Distractions can be good; if we are stuck on a problem, stepping away from it gives our subconscious time to work on it. *But for this to occur we must first have held a particular goal or problem in our minds;* without this, unconscious thinking will not occur. Furthermore, the internet is so broad and so distracting that it often short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, by scattering our attention so often and so widely that our minds haven't the time or space to think deeply or creatively; we simple become signal-processing units, processing reams of often unrelated information. >💡 Heavy usage of any tool or medium will have neurological consequences; the internet is no different. And time spent this way causes neural circuits that are not being used (those for deep contemplation of a long-form text) to be pruned away by the brain. These changes can be seen in brain scans of experienced Google users. Five hours on the internet is enough to see these brain changes. Different brain regions are activated when searching and reading online than with reading books. One positive is that internet usage may help to keep older people's minds sharp. ### Disadvantages of reading online [[Disadvantages of reading online]] # Thoughts on this book It has a lot of similarities with [[Deep Work]] # Notes I was aware of this book because my father [[Kevin McNicholas]] owns it. I began reading it as I suspect it will help me to investigate [[The Technology-Productivity Link and Decline]]. # Meta **Author**:: [[Nicholas Carr]] **Genre**:: #Book/Genre/Productivity #Book/Genre/Internet **Format**:: #Book/Format/Digital **Purchased**:: 20/08/2021 **Location**:: Kindle **Rating**:: 10/10 **Status**:: #Book/Status/Summarising **Began reading**:: 07/09/2021 **Finished reading**:: 14/09/2021