The question of whether new media technologies boggle the mind is an old one, dating back to classical antiquity. Nicholas Carr, in his new book the shallowsa nuanced and considered study of the harmful effects of excessive Internet use, uses the fascinating example of Plato and Socrates.
History of new media technologies
In Plato’s famous dialogue Phaedrus, the philosopher has Socrates discussing the merits of writing with Phaedrus. Socrates relates a story about a meeting between the Egyptian god Theuth, who among other things invented the alphabet, and Thamus, a king of Egypt. Tech expert Theuth argues that writing will be a boon to society as it will enable the storage of information and thus provide “a recipe for memory and wisdom”. Thamus disagrees, suggesting that writing will have a deleterious effect on memory, as people lazily trust what is found in these early databanks. Thamus goes on to say that writing will not create true wisdom, as people will not cultivate their minds. Rather it will create a kind of false wisdom. The dialogue makes it clear that Socrates agrees with Thamus.
Plato was not on Socrates’ side in this matter. On The Republic he argues against poetry, which in ancient times represented oral tradition. Poetry was declaimed in public, rather than written down. Plato felt that the advantages of writing outweighed a purely oral culture. Writing would encourage the reader to be logical, self-sufficient, and rigorous.
Even in the fourth century BC. C., in Greece, there was concern that the new writing technology based on the alphabet had the power to change the way the mind worked. Many centuries later, modern machines would have a remarkable effect on thought and literature. In 1882, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche discovered that his eyesight was failing and he could not concentrate when he tried to write with pencil and paper. To solve this problem, he ordered a Danish-made Malling-Hansen Writing Ball typewriter, which would allow him to close his eyes and type. The philosopher found that the heavy blows of the contraption during composition had a perceptible effect on his writing, making his prose tighter and more telegraphic. He concluded that, ‘Our writing team participates in the formation of our thoughts.’
the shallows has an alarming subtitle: what the Internet is doing to our brains. It’s tempting to think from this flashy book that Nicholas Carr is eager to scold Internet users and predict the decline and fall of Western civilization. This is not the case, fortunately, and the shallows surprises with its broad historical view and balanced analysis of how the media affect the quality of our thinking and reading. For every advance in information technology, there has been a clamor of voices warning of its dangers. When Gutenberg’s press revolutionized the accessibility of information, Robert Burton, author of An anatomy of melancholy (1628), lamented the plethora of books and the mental turmoil they caused. “One of the great diseases of the age is the multitude of books that overload the world so much that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is incubated and brought into the world every day.” Sounds familiar?
How the Internet Affects the Way We Read and Think
The basic conclusion of the shallows is that what a new technology gives with one side, it takes away with the other. The more ease and convenience the Internet puts before us, the more it takes away from us the ability to exercise our brains more rigorously. It favors light and scattered reading. And despite all the information we collect so hastily, much of it is quickly forgotten. If recalled, it is so fractured that it cannot be integrated into a primordial scheme or logic that benefits our understanding of the world or ourselves.
the shallows provides many examples of how cognition is diminished by the Internet’s powerful ability to store, collect, and classify information for us. In one study, two separate groups of people were given an identical online task. One group used programs that provided helpful prompts, thus making the task more ‘user-friendly’. The second group did not receive these same prompts, but had to solve the task more on their own. Eight months later, the two groups met again to do the same puzzle. Those who had done the more intellectually demanding program were able to complete the task twice as fast as the ‘easy to use’ program group. Dutch researcher Christof van Nimwegen found that the group using the most difficult program was able to plan ahead and strategize, while the other group relied more on trial and error to solve their puzzle.
Another study mapped how much information is retained when reading hyperlinked text. Hyperlinks have been hailed by many educators as a new way to enhance learning. To test this theory, Canadian academics gave seventy people a short Elizabeth Bowen story to read, ‘The Devil’s Lover’. One group read the story cover to cover, with no links. The second group read the story replete with hyperlinks, like you would find in any online article. Hypertext readers in later interviews about what they had read reported finding the story confusing and “very jumpy”. The other group had no such difficulties.
To add more alarm to this mix, a researcher tracked the eye movements of Web users by hooking up a small camera that traced their eye movements as they read pages of text. The eye reads web pages in the form of an F. We just read the first few lines of text, then the eye quickly plummets to the bottom of the page. (Disappointing news for those who write articles online!)
What are the lessons that can be drawn from the shallows? The Internet is without a doubt an amazing and powerful tool that has improved our lives incredibly. Who wants to go back to queuing at banks when all of their banking can be done from the comfort of home? What writer or researcher would want to return to haunting the dusty bookshelves and aisles of libraries, when so much more is accessible at the click of a mouse?
However, an over-reliance on, or obsession with, the Internet as the beginning and end of wisdom, intelligence, and information is a mistake. Just as preliterate societies produced great oral poetry and could cultivate deep intellectual and philosophical awareness, we moderns can also find other avenues of intellectual stimulation. Reading books without the continual interruptions of the Internet is one way. Sitting in a quiet natural setting and ‘reading nature’ is another way (again, studies have found that we think much more clearly in these peaceful settings).
A reading culture that is now moving inexorably towards the Internet from the printed page is an ‘F’ shaped reading culture: shallow, fragmented, shallow and forgetful. What this means for our intellectual and cultural future is anyone’s guess.
The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains, by Nicholas Carr. Published in 2010 by WW Norton and Company. ISBN: 978-0-393-07222-8