Now that I’m doing a smartphone detox, I’m more curious than normal about how the internet and social media work, as well as how using them affect our brains. So when I heard about The Shallows, I was extremely interested since the subtitle was “what the internet is doing to our brains”.

The Shallows covers the way thinking has changed over time and the effects of the internet but in a nutshell, here is the argument: the way content is delivered is just as important as the content being delivered, and so the fragmented, hyperlinked nature of the internet turns our minds into easily distracted ones, unable to concentrate or do the deep reading that we used to do.

Although the book was published in 2011, which in internet time is a long, long time ago, most of the arguments feel pretty current. Some points that got me thinking:

• “Brain scans have also revealed that people whose written language uses logographic symbols, like the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is considerably different from the circuitry found in people whose written language employs a phonetic alphabet” – I wonder how the brains of people bilingual/multilingual in logographic and phonetic languages (e.g. I speak English, Chinese, and Japanese) handle this. Are the circuitries merged? Are there two circuitries?
• Chapter Six: The Very Image of a Book has many anecdotes about people who are unable to read for ebooks for long periods of time and are very distracted by the hyperlinks inside. While I agree that hyperlinks in ebooks are very distracting, these experiences are actually very different from my ebook reading experience (which is similar to reading a conventional book). Since the book mainly brings out anecdotes, I’d like some stats on how people are reading ebooks (are they distracted?) and the number of enhanced ebooks (ebooks with audio+visual elements) in the market compared to regular text-only ebooks. I suspect the point on ebooks making people more distracted while reading would be weakened if it turned out that most people read with the wifi off (no hyperlinks to click) or if only a small proportion of ebooks in the market are enhanced ebooks.
• “Our use of the internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.” – In other words, we’re addicted to our phones and the internet, but rather than focusing on one thing (like a book or an essay), we jump from status update to status update, from post to post. I’ve got to admit, that’s pretty true for me.
• “We no longer have the patience to await time’s slow and scrupulous winnowing. Inundated at every moment by information of immediate interest, we have little choice but to resort to auomated filters, which grant their privilege, instantaneously, to the new and the popular.” – Basically, we used to be able to tell which ideas were good by seeing which could last through the years, but now we’re being inundated with suggestions. This could possibly be fixed through SEO changes, such as ranking older pages that are constantly linked to higher than newer pages that have no links (actually, isn’t this how SEO works right now?)
• Chapter Nine talks about how memorising things is actually the first step into understanding them. It says that it is by internalising a fact or passage that we absorb the ideas and can then transform it. The chapter then goes on to argue the difference between pocket calculators and the internet, saying that the “Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long term memories and the development of schemas.” I wonder if this effect is because of the nature of the internet or the way we use it – are there ways of changing the way we use the internet to allow it to be an aid to long term memories? I have no idea, but I do think that writing reviews like this one forces me to think more about the book, which in turn helps me to remember it better. Of course, you don’t need the internet for that, but it is convenient to have it all in one place and never have to worry about your hand getting tired or running out of space.

The last point, and perhaps the most major one, is one from the fourth chapter of the book. As Carr traces the development of reading, he talks about the shift from reading aloud to reading silently and says that “to read a book silently required an ability to concentrate intently over a long period of time, to ‘lose oneself’ in the pages of a book, as we now say. Developing such mental discipline was not easy. 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.” (emphasis added)

If the natural state of the human brain is distractedness, doesn’t that mean that the way the Net affects our brains is actually bringing our brains closer to their ‘original nature’? Now, I have no idea if it’s true we’re naturally distracted people, or which state is better (the book implies it’s the deep reading state, but this came about in the Middle Ages, and for a long time, only to the elite) but it does make me wonder if we’re just entering a new phase and if we’ll trend back towards longform reading. I know articles and blogposts are no match for books (even novellas) in terms of word count, but a recent survey of bloggers says that longer posts (2k+ words) are doing better than shorter posts. Does this herald a trend towards long and longer content?

Overall, this was an interesting and thought-provoking book. It would be interesting to see an update or the latest research to this, so if you have any recommendations or if you’ve read this and have an opinion, let me know!