Nicholas Carr gave a reading at the Harvard Book Store last week from his new book, “The Shallows“—a well-informed but frustrating sequel to his argument that Google might be making us stupid.
I agree with Carr that webby habits can make us “stupid,” and thankfully he’s far more thoughtful than that in the book. He lays out recent research showing that neuroplasticity doesn’t end when you reach adulthood—which is good news, except, according to Carr, the way we use the Internet (or the way Internet uses us, as Carr so cleverly flips it) might be reshaping our brains in a harmful way. Since digital media are constantly distracting us and forcing us to multitask, the argument goes, we spend ever less time “thinking deeply” and ever more time skipping from link to link and tab to tab. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words,” Carr waxes. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
I think this is true. If I spend a day hopping from emails to IMs to texts, etc., I feel more distracted, and it’s harder to curl up with a book for hours on end. There are plenty of studies showing that this type of omnivorism has cognitive benefits, too, but it’s definitely the case that the more I “zip along the surface,” the harder it is to pay attention.
What I don’t agree with is Carr’s reaction. He writes in the book, and happily recounted in his talk, that before he wrote this book, he packed up his life in Boston and moved to the faraway mountains of Colorado. There’s no cell phone service there, he says, and only a “relatively poky DSL connection.” He left Twitter and Facebook, closed his blog, reduced his Skyping and IMing, and stopped using his RSS reader. Email refreshes were reduced to once an hour, and when that proved to be too distracting, he kept his email program closed for most of the day.
I admire the discipline, but the framing of it is misguided. “For months, my synapses howled for their Net fix,” he writes.
I found myself sneaking clicks on the “check for new mail” button. Occasionally, I’d go on a daylong Web binge. But in time the cravings subsided, and I found myself able to type at my keyboard for hours on end or to read through a dense academic paper without my mind wandering.
At the end of writing the book, Carr says he’s “already backsliding” into incessant email checking, blogging, Pandora-streaming, and all the rest.
The lumping together of all things digital is frustrating on its own, but what really frustrates is the idea that digital tools are little more than drugs, and highly addictive ones. They may well be harmful and habit-forming, under certain circumstances, but zero tolerance is definitely not the answer. Instead, I think we need to figure out ways to use the web (in all its forms) in smart, brain-friendly ways. Call it “digital literacy.” There’s nothing wrong with escaping to an analog mountaintop—we all need that—but it’s not a permanent solution.
