Has anyone else read this book? (The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.) It investigates how our increasing dependence on the internet and other technologies is changing our brains and how we think, and some possible negative consequences of these changes (we think broadly rather than deeply, we tend to not learn things because we know we can look it up instead, we are losing some of our empathy, compassion, and connectedness with other human beings, we live in a constant distracted, overstimulated state, etc.). What do you think? There’s not much debate about IF the internet is changing our brains (it is); the debate is if that is a good thing, a bad thing, or a neutral thing.
And of course, my first reaction on finishing the book is to come to the internet to have a discussion about it.
I haven’t read the book but I can tell you that my use of the internet has so wrecked my ability to concentrate on one activity that I would have a difficult time reading the book in the first place. I can’t even watch TV anymore, because I don’t have the attention span to watch TV.
Haven’t read it, but am familiar with the concept. It’s another way of saying: “the medium is the message” - i.e., the topics a society focuses on, and how they go about focusing on them, is driven and influenced by the media they use to communicate.
Folks protested books when they emerged within the context of oral tradition.
The printing press changed societies and a person’s ability to share ideas broadly.
TV has had profound impact, both positive and negative vs. the pre-TV era.
It seems to me that, to a large extent, the Internet has encouraged deep thinking rather than broad. I can let the 'Net do my broad thinking for me (just let Wiki give me an overview of whatever topic I like), but I still have to do all of my own deep thinking.
You really are familiar with the concepts - you’ve practically outlined the book, including starting with Marshall McLuhan.
I agree with that to a point; I think a lot of people just stop at getting the broad overview from the internet, rather than taking the time to do some deep thinking about the broad information they receive. The point made in the book is also that spending most of your time (and brain resources) to do broad, shallow thinking creates a brain that is better at broad, shallow thinking - our brains are very plastic, and very much a “use it or lose it” organ. When (generic) you try to do some deep thinking, you might find that you’re rusty at it.
I’d say the internet has allowed YOU to do your deep thinking and forget about having to do your broad thinking. Whether it encourages that sort of behaviour in general is whole nother issue.
Cool. Per **Thudlow Boink **(one of my fave usernames, I don’t say enough), there’s a danger to having conversations about books you haven’t read ;), but I suspected the basic premise from what I have read about the book.
I find that conversations about structure-changing innovations like the internet are difficult to keep moving in a thoughtful direction. It is hard to get folks to let go of “it was better the old way! we’re losing an essential aspect of our humanity!” fears and instead fit this type of change within the context of the steady stream of innovation we have experienced for thousands of years.
Yes, we are going to lean on the internet, the same way we relied on printed maps and written instructions previously - i.e., it increases convenience across a broad array of information exchanges. at the expense of losing some key skills that connect us to nature (i.e., reading your terrain and surroundings; constructing your own tools, etc.).
The biggest emergent phenomena I see include:
Customizability deepening differences between groups - when all you get online is the stuff customized to your POV, can you work with other folks?
Different definitions of rights and personhood - the act of dealing with people online is one step removed from reality. So we are increasingly comfortable with “looser” definitions of “someone we trust enough to deal with.” This can be good - more open-mindedness with the folks we interact with online - but lead to a slippery definition of who has the right to do what online.
Completely different decision-making skills - yes, the internet supports decision-making and that can be scary. Will I end up a child-like imbecile incapable of thinking for myself? Nah - but my decision-making skills will be tuned to take advantage of the internet’s resources. If you don’t know how to build a fire in the forest - but you know how to look it up in a book - is that the book’s fault? And is the internet anything more than an extension of that phenomenon?
There are others, but these are a few I think about.
I’ve read The Shallows. I tried to force myself to read it cover to cover, but my brain is just too degraded from internet use, and I ended up reading a few of the more interesting-looking parts out of order- still, I did read the whole book.
It’s an okay book, but the core idea is basically a repeat of a much shorter essay he wrote earlier, padded out to book length. The paperbook edition has a quote on the back, “SILENT SPRING FOR THE LITERARY MIND,” which is of course very hyperbolic, because Carr never really suggests we do anything (or can do anything) about abolishing the internet. It’s all problem, no solution.
Agreed. I don’t think there’s any chance of the internet going away - our technology usage is just going to increase. I guess maybe the point is to be aware - I want to still be able to sit down with a book and get lost in it, so I make a point of continuing to do that.
Maybe we’ll all end up as childlike imbeciles who won’t be able to figure out what to do if we’re cold without posting about it or texting someone.
I read it. Regarding ability to learn/memory issues, I have to agree. There are a lot of facts and trivia for which I’ve bookmarked the site containing them rather than memorizing the information. I do think that I can still concentrate well enough to read a book in one or two sittings as I once did, but I feel antsy and unproductive.
Where I really think I’ve been affected is regarding the telephone. It seems so antiquated and intrusive vs. email.
I’ve read it. I agree with it. Another excellent book on the same subject is The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein. As the title suggests, that one focuses on children and education, but the trends that it finds are largely the same.
As a teacher, I can see this sort of thing going on all the time in the classroom. For a student to move from understand math only in terms of arithmetic to understand algebra is a major conceptual leap. To make that leap, it’s not sufficient merely to hear an explanation one time, nor to read it one time. It requires the student to do an enormous number of practice problems that actually require algebra. In the process of doing those problems, the student gradually changes his or her mental framework from one focused on arithmetic to one focused on the abstractions that make up algebra. Nowadays it’s much harder to get students to focus long enough to do a long problem set. There are tons of surveys testifying to the fact that students spend less time on studying, reading, and homework now than a generation or two ago.
Obviously algebra isn’t a solitary case. There are many topics in math that require shifting to a new conceptual framework, and as many topics in other areas as well. Without the willingness to devote large blocks of time to wrangling with intellectual material, students will not be able to clear those barriers.
You know, I was actually alive and in school a generation ago, and the kids then were really not any brighter or more studious than the ones today. Maybe I’m just uncommonly honest or lacking in nostalgia, but really, I am not remembering a school full of deep-thinking children when I think back to my school days. I never remember classrooms full of kids who were happy to devote long stretches of time to practicing algebra. I look at the status updates of the people I went to school with and their English is just as shitty as anyone 20 years their junior.
Let’s be honest; complaining about kids sells books. A book called “Kids Today Are Pretty Smart, All in All” would probably be more accurate but wouldn’t sell.
I’d need to see this distinction fleshed out before I could know how to respond.
I cannot see what could be wrong with this. (Unless what is meant is: “We tend not to learn anything because we know we can look some things up.” But of course, that statement would be patently false, so I doubt that’s what is meant.)
In my experience, my connectedness is greater because of the internet, and I’ve never lacked for empathy or compassion so I can’t speak to that. However that’s just my experience–does the book adduce some evidence that internet users are caused thereby to be less empathetic or compassionate? Less connected? (What is the definition of connected here?)
Thinking broadly (and shallowly) is flitting from topic to topic, following links and spending seconds on what you find and then moving on to the next link. Thinking deeply means cogitating on something, making connections between things and creating a deeper meaning, and building on that deeper meaning to learn things, create things, figure things out, etc. (creating what are known as “schemas” in our brains).
I’m not sure if this is a bad thing yet, either. I don’t need to know the population of the world’s major cities; if I need to know one, I look it up in few keystrokes.
The book does indeed; the connectedness we have through the internet (and I do agree that we are massively connected, like humans have never been connected to each other before) is at a distance, at a remove, though - you don’t have to look any further than the Straight Dope to see instances of less empathy and compassion. People say things to other people here that they would never say to someone’s face, because they’re just typing to a screen - there is no hurt face to look at after you say something mean.
Our overwhelming but remote connectedness could be contributing to compassion fatigue as well - if every time I watch tv I see and hear about all the terrible things happening to people all over the world, there comes a point when I just can’t care about all of it any longer.
I don’t have kids so I don’t know how this is playing out, but I see kids have phones and are calling and texting each other all the time - are they still seeing other kids in person as much as they used to? Are kids still being socialized face-to-face, or are they more comfortable talking on a phone or texting? I see kids walking side by side, and both of them texting away instead of talking to each other.
In some cases it would be self-evident, I would think. If you’re at a baseball game and you have a heart attack, would you prefer that the guy next to you knows CPR or merely knows how to look up CPR on the internet?
However, in a broader sense there are still good reasons why information should be in our heads rather than merely somewhere where we could get to it if we needed to. We encounter the world on a daily basis and we interpret what we encounter using the things that are actually in our heads. If we rely on Wikipedia or any other source outside of us, we get a less rich experience. Even though those outside sources have vastly more information, we’re not going to access the information that we need from outside to get the most from our daily experience. In many cases we may not even know what outside information we need, or we may not even be aware that there is some information which could be useful.
A researcher named Daniel T. Willingham has done lots of research that is useful for understanding the learning process. One of his results is that the “rich get richer” as far as knowledge. That is to say, those who start out knowing more will continue to learn at a greater rate, while those who stay behind will fall farther and farther behind. One experiment ranked children by the size of their vocabularies and found that those who had the largest vocabularies learned the most knew words in the space of a year. To see why this is, imagine that a student reads this sentence: “While Mary was loquacious, her sister Sarah was much more reticent.” If the student knows that “reticent” means, he or she can pick up the meaning of “loquacious” by basic logic. But if the student doesn’t know that “reticent” means, then he or she can’t. The fact that anyone can look up the definition of reticent online doesn’t help, as the student isn’t likely to do so in the process of reading.
Or, for another example, imagine a student drives over a bridge and sees a plaque which says that the bridge was built in 1933. If the student knows what was taking place in 1933, he or she can figure out the circumstances under which the bridge was built; otherwise not. The fact that one can look up the events taking place in 1933 doesn’t help, because the student won’t look them up. If the student doesn’t know the historical information, he or she won’t be alerted to the fact that there’s something to learn here.
Obviously those are two very simple examples, but the same logic applies in more complicated examples. The more information that we actually have in our heads, the more we actually engage intellectually with the world. The less information that we have in our heads, the more we miss out on, even if the information is available online. Now we all agree–unless Sarah Palin is participating in this thread–that intellectual engagement is a good thing, so the internet is causing us to lose out by convincing us not to store information in our minds.
Nicely put, ITR Champion. The book gives the example of kids using calculators in school, which people often use as an example (for good and for bad) of how learning is changing in the world of Google and the internet, but using a calculator for math is not the same as not learning math at all (or not learning why you need math every day). I was trying to think of how this will change how teachers teach and kids learn in school; I’m no expert, but someone somewhere has to figure out what kids actually need to learn, and what they can use the internet to find out, and the people figuring that out should have an idea about how the internet is changing our brains and how we learn and how we think, I would hope.
I think there’s a false dilemma being created here between depth and breadth of knowledge. I again submit that it’s fallacious to think we had a lot more deep thinkers around prior to the Internet, but anyway, I’d like to point out that it’s just plainly wrong to see depth and breadth as offsetting traits.
Depth of knowledge without breadth, or vice versa, is inherently limited. You can’t have depth of knowledge without breadth. It’s not possible to understand a subject in depth without having the support of broad knowledge. If I were to challenge you to explain, in depth, the Industrial Revolution in England, you simply couldn’t understand the subject matter without an understand not only of the sequece of events, but heavy helpings of economics, military history, and the long term political history of England, Britain and Europe. It’d also help a lot to have a passing understanding og the physics and chemistry involved in the relevant technologies, as well as an understanding of the technologies themselves, plus a reasonable understanding of the sociological features of 19th-century Britain.
Knowledge is like digging a hole at the beach; you can’t keep digging straight down without expanding the sides of the hole, or it’ll collapse. You cannot have useful deep knowledge without associated broad understanding.
If this were true, what else would also be true?
If people were losing their sense of compassion and empathy, we would expect other behaviours to change in predictable ways. Violent behaviour, for instance, would presumably climb as people lost empathy and compassion for one another. Antisocial behaviour would be directly correlated with access to computers. But that does not seem to be happening.
[QUOTE=ITR Champion]
The less information that we have in our heads, the more we miss out on, even if the information is available online.
[/QUOTE]
This would be very concerning indeed if, in fact, there was any evidence that the existence of the Internet causes people to have less information in their heads.
Are people with encyclopedias less knowledgeable than people without?
