lars4learning: January 2011

THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS. By Nicholas G. Carr. W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 256 pages.

In the summer of 2008, the Atlantic published a piece by Nicholas Carr that tore through American literary culture. In an all too ironic twist, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains" became an internet hit.

The twist was that even though Carr warned that the way we take in printed (or pixilated) words was changing how we processed those words, probably for the worse, scads of folks seemed to be processing his words in the old-fashioned way.

Citing research, he said internet users are "hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited," and that they "typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book." But at least some internet users were clicking on his article and staying there for its 4,000 plus words, as evidenced by liberal quoting from the piece in thoughtful debates not only on blogs but also in print.

Soon, the essay had been included in several anthologies. And Carr expanded it into The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Presumably he expects, or at least hopes, that readers will persevere through its 200 plus pages. Book consumers, still around, if in shrinking numbers, did buy it. The Shallows has sold steadily since its release this summer.

There’s a reason. It resonates. Many of us feel that the internet has taken away as much as it has given. We can identify with the dilemma Carr faces. On the one hand, he is grateful: "Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes." But after "reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, following Facebook updates, watching video streams, downloading music, or just tripping lightly from link to link to link to link," he begins to feel "what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation."

"The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

Has deep reading ever been natural? Thoughtful, reflective immersion in printed words has always taken effort. First we have to spend a great deal of time learning how to decode the symbols, a process that a significant number of intelligent children have tremendous difficulties mastering. Once that process becomes automatic, we still have to find a space free from distraction and the discipline to fully engage with abstract ideas. Not easy things for the human animal, even in pre-computer times.

Carr himself acknowledges that unlike language, "reading and writing are unnatural acts."

There is no doubt that the increased time we human animals are spending moving our eyeballs on screens and our digits on clickers and keys is changing our brains, and thus will change the way we do those unnatural acts. An essential property of the brain is its malleability, and Carr limns the startingly recent developments in neuroscience that have overthrown the long-held view of the brain as a static organ.

In 1968, using microelectrodes to probe monkeys’ brains after he had severed nerves in their hands, a young Michael Merzernich was incredulous to find an "astounding reorganization." After an initial period of confusion, the brains had rewired themselves so that the monkeys could get back to business as usual.

Merzernich’s work was dismissed, or ignored, because as he put it, "nobody would believe that neuroplasticity was occurring on this scale." As scientists’ ability to monitor brain function rapidly improved with more and more advanced technology, nearly everybody would believe that our brains are, in Merzenich’s words, "massively plastic."

So plastic that brain scans of experienced London cabdrivers show the part of their brain associated with environmental mapping is much larger than normal.

Not everyone becomes, or wants to be, a London cabdriver. Literacy, however, is a desired attribute in nearly all cultures, and necessary for a comfortable level of survival in nearly all societies. That’s a very recent phenomenon.

For widespread literacy you first need an alphabet, then typographical conventions that let you know when words and thoughts begin and end, then recognized formats for presenting stories, observations and commentaries, and finally efficient ways to produce and deliver that content to wide swaths of the public. We’ve only reached that point in the last few hundred years.

Carr excels at presenting the history behind that achievement, and making a case for its staggering effect. Without what he calls "the literary ethic," no Locke, no Nietzche, no Einstein. No Enlightenment. No Scientific Revolution. For that matter, no computers. The ability to produce and consume print has altered all of our brains in ways far more profound than the enlarged posterior hippocampus of a veteran London cabdriver.

Now, Carr alerts us, the even more rapid development of computer interface is even more drastically changing what we are. It’s more than shallower content. The reason the content is shallower is due to the very nature of the medium, which is multisensory and hyper-fast. "Producers are chopping up their products," Carr writes, "to fit the shorter attention spans of online consumers, as well as to raise their profiles on search engines."

Changing the message came after changing the medium. Hello, Marshall McLuhan. Stop whining about the onslaught of superfluous celebrity news, vapid e-mails, obtuse polemic and ubiquitous pornography, Carr tells us. Deliciously quoting McLuhan, he notes that "the content of a medium is just 'the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.'"

The real danger is not reading cruddy prose. The new way in which we read could diminish thoughtfulness itself. Because the "juggler’s brain" used in surfing the internet is intent on attending to multiple and disparate links, we are using all of our limited working memory space. We can’t draw on long-term memory, much less add to it; we can’t supply context.

Scary. If long-term memory is absent, what is left? A true tabula rasa? I agree with Carr when he states, "The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory to long-term memory and weave it into conceptual schema." A human brain is not analogous to a computer. The brain, a marvel of messiness, can’t outsource memory. But it can do what computers cannot: compare and evaluate, reflect and synthesize. Think. Really, it’s true. A computer cannot think.

Working with children has taught me the importance of background. A kid can’t learn a new concept until he’s got some context. He constructs knowledge on previous knowledge. The concern over the threat to cognition from the online environment is particularly salient when we’re talking about children. This is where I applaud Carr for sounding the alarm.

Carr finds Google founder Sergey Brin’s view that if you "had an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off," upsetting because it is based on a "pinched concept of the human mind." It’s a view of a future that’s far from the liberating of human potential, and closer to the early twentieth century "scientific management" principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor, champion of assembly-line efficiency, the man who said, "In the past man has been first; in the future the system must be first."

I would like to think that we have the opportunity and the ability to go beyond the Industrial Age. I hope that my internet explorations won’t turn me into "a human HAL." That in our awareness of danger we can avoid it.

Throughout human history, what Carr terms "intellectual technologies" have changed the very shape of that history. "Instrumentalists" believe that it was the users who were key; "determinists" believe it was the tools themselves. Carr places himself in the determinist camp: "It strains belief to argue that we 'chose' to use maps and clocks."

I would like to think that the truth is somewhere in between. Maps and clocks forever changed us; so will the internet. But we do have control over when and how we use maps, clocks and the internet, and the power not to erase everything that went before them.

A significant number of people did read Carr’s original essay. A significant number of people have read The Shallows. There might even be a number of people reading War and Peace at this very moment.

Not everyone agrees with the Rhodes scholar Carr cites as declaring, "Sitting down and going through a book cover to cover just doesn’t make sense." Otherwise there would be no Goodreads, and I’d be typing this review only for myself.

Deep reading has always meant mental work, and there have always been people who don’t want to do that. Lots of people. Sometimes I don’t want to. But there remain people who, like David Ulin (The Lost Art of Reading), can say, "It's harder than it used to be, but still, I read."

The Shallows is provocative, informative, clearly and beautifully written. It’s also disturbing and depressing. Read it without giving up.

lars4learning

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

RECENT NEWS: MY REVIEW OF "THE SHALLOWS"

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WORLD OF LEARNING: TRAVAILS OF MIDDLE SCHOOL

WORLD OF LEARNING: LANGUAGE

WORLD OF LEARNING

WORLD OF LEARNING: DEEP READING

WORLD OF LEARNING

Thoughts on children's books, reflections on learning and the brain

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