Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows, explores the intellectual and cultural consequences of the Internet. Carr argues that human thought has been shaped by various tools of the mind, such as the alphabet, maps, the printing press, clocks, and computers. He also interweaves neuroscience discoveries by Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel.
Carr argues that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. The printed book promoted deep and creative thought, while the Internet encourages rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources.
Carr argues that the Net is remaking us in its own image, promoting speed and efficiency and losing our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. The book is part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, and it will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.
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About the Author
Writer Nicholas Carr, a New York Times bestselling author, explores the ways in which technology affects people’s relationships, thoughts, and lives. More than twenty-five languages have translated his works, including “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize.
Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart,” his upcoming book, is now online for presale and will be released in January 2025.
Hailed as “a modern classic,” “The Shallows” debuted as a New York Times bestseller in 2010 and continues to be a touchstone for discussions on how technology affects our perceptions and thinking. In 2020, a revised and extended edition of “The Shallows” reached the market. Carr’s 2014 book.
The Glass Cage: Automation and Us,” dubbed a “chastening meditation on the human future” by the New York Review of Books, examines the social and personal repercussions of our increasing reliance on robots, computers, and apps.
In 2017, he published “Utopia Is Creepy,” a collection of his finest blog entries, articles, and other works over the previous 12 years. “By turns wry and revelatory,” Discover remarked of the compilation.
In addition, Carr wrote two other important books: “Does IT Matter?” (2004), which was hotly argued and widely discussed, and “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google” (2008), which the Financial Times referred to as “the best read so far about the significance of the shift to cloud computing.”
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In addition to the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, Nature, and MIT Technology Review, Carr has contributed to several periodicals, journals, and newspapers.
His pieces have appeared in a number of anthologies, such as The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best Technology Writing. These include “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “The Great Forgetting.
“In the past, he served as executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and visiting professor of sociology at Williams College in Massachusetts. He was given the Media Ecology Association’s Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity in 2015.
In 2005, he started writing for the well-known site Rough Type. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A. and Harvard University with an M.A. in English and American Literature and Language.
Review
“A thought provoking exploration of the Internet’s physical and cultural consequences, rendering highly technical material intelligible to the general reader.”
― The 2011 Pulitzer Prize Committee
“A must-read for any desk jockey concerned about the Web’s deleterious effects on the mind.”
― Newsweek
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“Starred Review. Carr provides a deep, enlightening examination of how the Internet influences the brain and its neural pathways. Carr’s analysis incorporates a wealth of neuroscience and other research, as well as philosophy, science, history and cultural developments …
His fantastic investigation of the effect of the Internet on our neurological selves concludes with a very humanistic petition for balancing our human and computer interactions … Highly recommended.”
― Library Journal
“This is a measured manifesto. Even as Carr bemoans his vanishing attention span, he’s careful to note the usefulness of the Internet, which provides us with access to a near infinitude of information.
We might be consigned to the intellectual shallows, but these shallows are as wide as a vast ocean.”
― Jonah Lehrer, The New York Times Book Review
“This is a lovely story well told―an ode to a quieter, less frenetic time when reading was more than skimming and thought was more than mere recitation.”
― San Francisco Chronicle
“The Shallows isn’t McLuhan’s Understanding Media, but the curiosity rather than trepidation with which Carr reports on the effects of online culture pulls him well into line with his predecessor. . Carr’s ability to crosscut between cognitive studies involving monkeys and eerily prescient prefigurations of the modern computer opens a line of inquiry into the relationship between humans and technology.”
― Ellen Wernecke,, The Onion A.V. Club
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“The subtitle of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition of those published in the 1950s about how rock ’n’ roll was corrupting the nation’s youth … But this is no such book.
It is a patient and rewarding popularization of some of the research being done at the frontiers of brain science … Mild-mannered, never polemical, with nothing of the Luddite about him, Carr makes his points with a lot of apt citations and wide-ranging erudition.”
― Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times
“Nicholas Carr has written an important and timely book. See if you can stay off the web long enough to read it!”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
“Neither a tub-thumpingly alarmist jeremiad nor a breathlessly Panglossian ode to the digital self, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is a deeply thoughtful, surprising exploration of our “frenzied” psyches in the age of the Internet. Whether you do it in pixels or pages, read this book.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, author, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
“Nicholas Carr carefully examines the most important topic in contemporary culture―the mental and social transformation created by our new electronic environment. Without ever losing sight of the larger questions at stake, he calmly demolishes the clichés that have dominated discussions about the Internet.
Witty, ambitious, and immensely readable, The Shallows actually manages to describe the weird, new, artificial world in which we now live.”
― Dana Gioia, poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts
“The core of education is this: developing the capacity to concentrate. The fruits of this capacity we call civilisation. But all that is finished, perhaps. Welcome to the shallows, where the un-educating of Homo sapiens begins.
Nicholas Carr does a wonderful job synthesising the recent cognitive research. In doing so, he gently refutes the ideologists of progress and shows what is really at stake in the daily habits of our wired lives: the re-constitution of our minds.
What emerges for the reader, inexorably, is the suspicion that we have well and truly screwed ourselves.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class As Soulcraft
“Ultimately, The Shallows is a book about the preservation of the human capacity for contemplation and wisdom in an epoch where both appear increasingly threatened. Nick Carr provides a thought-provoking and intellectual account of how the medium of the Internet is changing the way we think now and how future generations will or will not think. Few works could be more important.”
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Summary
The Shallows explores the impact of the Internet on human cognition and its implications for human development and society. Author David Carr uses his personal experience with the Internet as a starting point, detailing his journey from using a computer in college to blogging and online writing in the early 2000s.
He then delves into the history of intellectual technology, scientific research on learning and memory, and academic studies on Internet use and the brain.
Introduces the concept of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change over time. Carr highlights the negative consequences of this change, such as addiction and mental disorders. Chapter 3 introduces intellectual technologies, such as the clock, map, book, and the Internet, which enhance or expand mental capabilities and must inherently change the way the brain functions.
Covers the history of computing technology and how new technologies displace and devalue previous ones. Chapter 6 examines the relationship between electronic, print, and Internet media and their effects on each other. Carr describes “the juggler’s brain,” the brain affected by the Internet, as videos, links, and pop-ups create cognitive overload.
Explains that human memory, integral to learning, is disrupted by Internet media, challenging the Internet as a tool for learning and suggesting that Internet use may impede long-term learning and cognitive development.
Carr concludes by stating that internet use can affect memory, learning, and complex emotional development. He encourages people to critically examine their Internet use and actively combat the cognitive side effects of Internet usage.