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)