Some notes on
CARR, Nicholas. The Shallows: what the internet is doing to
our brains. Norton: New York, 2010.
I was advised to read the book The Shallows. I had already
heard about it, but by the title I thought it would be one of those apocalyptic
books.
It was a pleasant surprise when I noticed from the first pages
that the writer brings many authors and research results into account. It is a
very well written book, a very pleasant and interesting reading, and in spite
of the alarming title, which pictures the main thesis of the whole text, the
author is not so pessimistic as the title makes us suppose; and as the media
made me believe.
Towards the last few pages of the book, the author writes a
paragraph that made me think that all the arguments he presents in the book,
were not enough to convince himself the computers will make us
"Shallows".
"As for me, I’m already
backsliding. With the end of this book in sight, I’ve gone back to keeping my
e-mail running all the time and I’ve jacked into my RSS feed again. I’ve been
playing around with a few new social networking services and have been posting
some new entries to my blog. I recently broke down and bought a Blu-ray player
with a built-in Wi-fi connection. It lets me stream music from Pandora, movies
from NetFlix, and videos from YouTube through my television and stereo. I have
to confess: it’s cool. I am not sure I could live without it”. (p. 200)
This is the path I will try to follow here: I will pick some
parts of the book, some arguments presented to the readers to show how shallow
we are becoming because of the computer, mainly the internet, and bring another
point of view so that we can try to find a balance. I will also show that some
arguments Nicholas Carr uses are not against computers and the internet.
Carr opens the book bringing Mc Luhan to the discussion and
the idea that “The medium is the message” to raise the debate between “Net
enthusiasts and Net skeptics” (p.2). I believe that being good or bad is not
something essential to the machine itself. It might be good for some people and
bad for others, it can be bad if used in a certain way or purpose and be good
for others. All inventions brings consequences, but we need to measure the
results and try to find the best way to use it before saying it is bad.
Radio, cinema, telephone, TV, they were all attacked at some
point and accused to destroy the relationships among people besides many other
bad consequences they would bring to people and society. Each one at its time
was treated as a villain. What we can say for sure about them today is that
there are good and bad points in each one, but if you are critical and
selective, you will certainly learn a lot from all of them and certainly be a
differentiated person because you had access to them. Computers and internet
are part of our lives, it is up to us now use them in the best way possible.
The main point of the book is that the Internet is destroying
our capacity for concentration and contemplation.
Reading books is considered in many chapters of the book as
a" linear thought process" (p.8). There is a "calm, focused,
undistracted" (p.10), linear mind that needs to fight against a new kind
of mind that is shattered. We cannot believe that reading is a linear process.
It is not and it will never be. Studies using eyetracking point that very
clearly. All the inferences, thinking, questioning and connections we make
during reading are not a linear process.
According to Carr, adding spaces to separate words made it
possible to do what he calls “deep reading” (p.63) “because word separation
freed the intellectual process of reading”. We cannot disagree that spaces
between words is an advance in writing technology that made reading easier, but
saying that from this point on people started reading more deeply is a strange
inference. So there was no deep reading before that? I doubt. Reading at that
time was for a very few people - mainly religious and aristocratic
representatives - that, certainly, could read and think deeply.
To be quiet for hours concentrated in one activity is not
natural for any rational specie. Animals were not made to pay attention at just
one thing and forget the others. This is encrusted in our genetics. As Carr
mentions “the natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most
of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness” (p.63). So,
if focussing on many different sources of information at the same time did so
bad to the brain, we would not become what we are now.
We need to exercise a lot in order to ‘dominate’ this survival
reflex that we had to develop for millions of years in order to survive, but
not everybody wants to be a “deep” reader, as well as not everybody wants to be
a soccer player with the higher physical development. I ask myself if, when we
are reading, we are really concentrated in just one thing (this would be a long
discussion, that I do not intend to develop here). The point is, it is
difficult to concentrate in just one thing for a long time, monks and academics
spend years exercising it, but it is not the computers fault. We cannot blame
the computers for this fact.
Carr also brings discussions about the brain and its functions
and its amazing plasticity - mentioning Damasio among many others researchers
to argue that "we became, neurologically what we think" (p.33)
Quoting Doidge "if we stop exercising our mental
skills," writes Doidge, "we do not just forget them: the brain map
space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead"
(p.35). Carr uses the argumentation about the plasticity of the brain to
convince us that we are not using our brain in a productive way when we use the
internet. According to his arguments, we are not making high level operations,
so we will become shallow because we are exercising only low level operations
in our brains. Research against research we have many studies showing that
using the internet requires high level operations as selection,
criticizing,evaluating, comparing, synthesising (Cornett, Coiro, Barsalai e
Zohar, etc)
Our students fail to be good readers of online texts because
they lack those abilities. We need to help them to develop those abilities,
instead of believing that they are getting shallow or taking them out of the
computer because the internet will make them get even worse. Those abilities
were never easy and will never be easy to develop, but internet can help us to do
that in a way that is meaningful to the students.
“Neurons that fire together wire together” is a classical saying
at the neuroscience area. But Edelman reminds us that we do not know exactly
what will be the result of neurons that are fired together in a persons’ mind.
We still cannot predict what meaning will be generated by the activation of
this or that network of neurons. So, changes in the brain areas that will be
activated while using a computer does not mean that this kind of mental
activity will be ‘higher’ or ‘lower’,’ better’ or ‘worse’ than other different
activations.
Based on Maryanne Wolfs’ work, Carr (p. 52-53) shows us that
different writing systems - as logographic and alphabetic, for example - seems
to activate distinct parts of the brain. Recruiting different areas of the
brain to process written language does not make a people (community /society)
better or worse than other.
Philosophers as Socrates, Descartes, Locke, among other were
raised in a discussion on the effects of the tools on the society, Carr gets
into a conclusion: "there is one thing that determinists and
instrumentalists can agree on: technological advances often mark turning points
in history" (p.48). It seems that we are living one of those turning
points, and we have to face it and make it work in the best way possible. Not
by thinking that digital technology will be a miraculous good to humanity
neither by believing that this will consist on an irreversible bad for the
human beings.
In the same way that Carr (p.55) tells us that Socrates, as
mentioned in Phaedrus, believed that “only ‘a simple person,’[...] would think
that a written account “was at all better than knowledge and recollection of
the same matters.” We can say that only a simple person could think that
“intellectually, our ancestors’ oral culture was in many ways a shallower one
than our own.” (p. 57). History shows us many examples of very developed
societies and cultures as Mayan and that we cannot say that our ancestors were
worse or shallower.
If are minimally concerned with a sustainable development and
believe that we have to change some of our habits and try to reuse or recycle
materials to avoid more damage to nature, that we need to find other materials
and sources of energy that do not pollute so much so on; in sum, if you have
the slightest ecological conscience, you might think that some native indian
that still live in peace in some areas of the Brazilian amazon forest, for
instance, are right to live the way they do and, at least, from an ecological
and sustainable point of view are much wiser them we, “intellectually deep”
people, are.
In many parts of the book we can see the idea that the book is
superior to texts online as in the following fragment: “Because the ubiquity of
text on the Net and our phones, we’re almost certainly reading more words today
than we did twenty years ago, but we’re devoting much less time to reading
words printed on paper.” (p.88). Do we really need to read printed texts, are
they more trustable, will they make us be better and deeper thinkers and
readers? One important aspect of the internet is that it makes available texts
and materials that we could not have access to or that would be difficult to
find or buy. Is makes information accessible, available for those who need or want
them. I will not get into the discussion on copyrights, but the fact is that,
because of the internet, we can have access to books, newspapers, papers, and
many other materials from all over the planet, that would be found only printed
before and were not accessible to everybody almost everywhere.
However, having so much information available can be dangerous. As
Carr mentions, “whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an
“ecosystem of interruption technologies”, as the blogger and science fiction
writer Cory Doctorow terms it.” (p.91). This is a fact, but this is also part
of life. We have to learn to deal with this and get focused in what we need.
If we are really motivated to do that reading or to know more about a subject,
I do not think that Internet will be an impediment. I much rather loosing concentration
every once and awhile than not having access to the information. As we have to
learn to deal with all the features of a computer screen as scrolling,
clicking, searching, browsing, we need to learn to focus at our main aims and
keep track of time when we are dealing with the computer.
According to Carr “when we go online, we enter an environment
that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial
learning. It’s possible 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 as rewards.” (p.116) Internet is big and
multipurpose. It might look like an infinite shopping mall if you will or a
huge casino, a magnificent concert hall, a 24/7 news channel, or Borges’
library. Getting distracted there is definitely easy, and Internet might be
pushing us towards the distraction. Keeping that in mind, teachers need to call
the students attention to focus on their aims when making a research or looking
for information online, among other reading strategies they need to develop to
be a better online reader (see Coiro's work).
It is really challenging to decide whether reading a printed
book is better than reading articles and gathering information on the net.
According to Carr “hopping across links crowds out the time we devote to quiet
reflection and contemplation” breaking apart “the circuits that support those
old intellectual functions” (p.120). Doing always only one kind of mental work
would in fact reinforce our brain to do that activity better, but it would be
better if we could develop and exercise many different skills often. Many times,
we do not need to read with a lot or reflection and contemplation. Many times,
we need to find and compare different information to select the one that best
fits us at that moment. We use internet for many purposes, and each one of them
demands different reading strategy and cognitive skills. If we use internet to
do different things, it cannot impair our “high level” cognitive skills,
because we will need to put many different skills in action.
Carr also mentions some experiments made by Gary Small to
discuss neurological effects of Internet. “The scans revealed that the brains
activity of the experienced Googlers was much broader than that of the
novices.” (p.121) As a control for this test, “the researchers had a group of
subjects to read a straight text in a simulation of book reading; in this case,
scans revealed no significant difference in brain activity between the two groups”
(p.121). After some days online, brain areas of the novice found to be dormant
on the other experiment showed extensive activity” (p.121). If that is so, why
should we consider using internet bad?
Those researchers also found that “when people search the Net
they exhibit a very different pattern of brain activity than they do when they
read book-like text. Book readers have a lot of activity in regions associated
with language, memory, and visual processing, but they do not display much
activity in the prefrontal regions associated with decision making and problem
solving. Experienced Net users, by contrast, display extensive activity across
all those brain regions when they scan and search Web pages. The good news here
is that Web surfing, because it engage so many brain functions, may help keep
older people’s minds sharp.” (p. 122)
There are two points I would like to add to this discussion.
One is that reading and navigating (net searching) are different actions. We
can read and navigate at the internet. It would be great if we could exercise
both activities often, and this is exactly what we can do using internet. The
other point is that reading different texts and for different purposes will
certainly bring different data for this research. Sometimes we want to browse
and find as many information as we can, other times we need just to check one
information, other times we want to go deep into a subject. The ideal is to be
able to use the right strategy for each reading situation.
Reading hypertext was expected to be in the 1980’s a
revolution that, to make a long story short, would improve learning. But it turned
out to be that it has not proven to be such a revolutionary tool as far as
learning is concerned. There are some discussions about it that we need to
make. I will start by saying that reading is not a linear process, books
(printed texts) are not linear. Starting from the premise that texts and
hypertext were different because one was linear, while the other was not, was
the first mistake. Another mistake is to compare searching to reading. Stricto
sensu browsing is not reading. It would be like comparing finding a text at the
library and actually reading the pages of the texts. Those are two very
different activities and should not be treated as one when the internet is
concerned. It is not fair to say that “readers of hypertext often ended clicking
distractedly through pages instead of reading then carefully” (p.126). They
probably do not get distracted, when they are personally involved in the task. If
they do get distracted anyway, we need, as educators, to work on their
“hypertext literacy” (Rouet, Levonen, 1996). It is a fallacy to think that
students/readers do not get distracted when they read printed texts. Their
distraction is harder to measure because they are not revealed in clicks.
Hypermedia was also attacked by Carr as something that would
not provide a richer learning experience for readers as many educators and
technology enthusiasts had suggested, because “the division of attention
demanded by multimedia further strains our cognitive abilities, diminishing our
learning and weakening our understanding” (p.129).
It would be naive to think that more inputs would bring better
results, because it would presuppose a behaviorist (in a bad sense of this
word) approach of learning. On the other hand, it is not wise to think that only
one stimulus is better that two or more. Thinking of different learning styles,
and multiple intelligences (Gardner), it would help learning if students could
have access to different kinds of information, and it would really make
learning a poorer process if the students do not have access to different sources
of information. Another aspect very important to learning is the teaching
approach. A constructive perspective matched to rich sources of materials would
bring better learning results than just knowing texts by heart, unless you
measure their ability to memorize and do not measure their ability to build
knowledge.
According to Carr “it would be a serious mistake to look
narrowly at the Net’s benefits and conclude that the technology is making us
more intelligent” (p.140). It might not be improving our intelligence, but it
is certainly giving us the opportunity to learn more, to communicate better,
broadly and freely.
Carr reinforces during the whole text that we are losing
“calm, linear thought - the ones we use in traversing a lengthy narrative or
and involved argument” (p.142). It is difficult to think of a narrative or
argumentative thought as linear. It might be calm, although a rich debate
usually gets warm and passionate.
“What the Net diminishes is [Samuel] Johnson’s primary kind of
knowledge: the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct
within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give
rise to a singular intelligence” (p.143). I might argue that internet is giving
us the possibility to be singular, to build our knowledge by ourselves. We are
not getting more or less intelligent, we are having the chance to learn by
ourselves, searching for the information we want to learn and choosing how deep
we want to go. Constructing connections and building knowledge are not easy and
natural tasks, mainly when we are talking about, academic, scientific knowledge.
I agree with Flynn, quoted by Carr: “we weren’t more
intelligent than they [our ancestors], but we had learnt to apply our
intelligence to a new set of problems.” (p.147) [,,,] We’re not smarter than
our parents or our parents’ parents. We’re just smart in different ways. And
that influences not only how we see the world, but also how we raise and
educate our children [...] that doesn’t mean that we have “better brains”. It
just means we have different brains” (p, 148).
Here is a challenge to education: schools need to prepare
students to be good readers of print and online texts of many kinds and for
different purposes.
The idea of a linear text is recurrent in the book. Carr
believes that “the linearity of the printed book is shattered, along with the
calm attentiveness it encourages in the reader” (p. 104). When discussing
Google’s idea to digitize books, Carr
mentions site effects of reading books online: “To make a book
discoverable and searchable online is also to dismember it. The cohesion of its
text, the linearity of its argument or narrative as it flows through scores of
pages, is sacrificed.” (p.165). The possibility of fragmentation does not mean
that all the books will be dismembered, always into broken pieces. The bible
has been dismembered for so many years, and is still seen as a whole. So many
times, getting to know a little fragment of a text serves as an invitation to
read the whole book.
Carr mentions that “there needs to be time for efficient data
collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine
and time to sit idly in the garden” and that today we are losing the ability to
balance that two different states of mind, since “mentally, we’re in perpetual
locomotion” (p. 168). I agree with him, because I myself need silence and time
to read and write, but I cannot imagine much time for sitting idly to get into
a contemplation mental state in the life of Bach with 10 kids (actually he had
20, but half of them passed away). I also cannot imagine a peaceful state at
Mozart’s mind. Different people concentrate in different ways. Besides that, if
we have everybody in the society willing to spend hours a day reading,
contemplating, and engaging in meditative thinking we would have a huge problem
in our society, as well as if we had everybody willing to be doctors, or
artists, or athletes, or secretaries or teachers, cooks, and so on. Vive la
difference! As they would say in France.
Like writing became a supplement to memory, and since books as
Eco puts it, “challenge and improve memory” (p.178), we can also believe, as
Clive Thompson suggests, that internet can “free our own gray matter for more
germanely ‘human’ tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming” (p.180), which we
can also call creating. We cannot accept the idea of William James that “the
art of remembering is the art of thinking”. This is far from obvious. Remembering
helps thinking, but we do not learn only by remembering. If we do not have the
ability to construct meaning, to make analogies, to make generalizations, to
create new ideas, to go against others ideas, and so on, we are not thinking
properly of the 21st century. If we deal with an information frequently and
consciously, it will soon be part of our long term memory or active memory.
When this information does not feature as necessary to our life anymore, it will be
gradually deactivated, and maybe vanish from our mnemonic system.
Times when social and political revolutions are taking place
in many parts of the planet (Arabic Spring, the protests in Turkey and in
Brazil in 2013) do not allow us to believe that “the price we pay to assume
technology’s power is alienation” (p.211). Those and many other social
movements are counting with the support of technology. The broadening of
communication systems afforded by Internet and social networks promote
communication among people, allowing them to discuss social, economic, and
political issues, as well as find means to expose and fight for their beliefs.
We shall not be naive and think that internet is paradise, but
it also do not make sense to blame it for abilities we did not develop, our
limitations, or inabilities.
As Carr mentions in the fragment we used in the beginning of
this text: “I have to confess: it’s cool. I am not sure I could live without
it” (p. 200). We cannot and we do not want to live without it. So, the best way
to follow is the path that will take the society to use it consciously and in
the best ways possible.
As Walter Ong, quoted in this
book, said: "technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior
transformations of consciousness" (p. 51)
