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The Shallows
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The Shallows (2010) (edit title/settings)

What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas G. Carr (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

The best-selling author of The Big Switch returns with an explosive look at technology’s effect on the mind. “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is... read more

Summary edit see section history

Drawing on research and studies in the fields of history, philosphy, and neuroscience, Carr explains how the Internet is re-mapping neural pathways in our minds. The Internet is not "bad" for our brains, as some people are apt to explain it, but rather help redefine neuroplastic paths in our... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

Drawing on research and studies in the fields of history, philosphy, and neuroscience, Carr explains how the Internet is re-mapping neural pathways in our minds. The Internet is not "bad" for our brains, as some people are apt to explain it, but rather help redefine neuroplastic paths in our brains, allowing us to think differently.

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.”
  • “Ralph Waldo Emerson put it more crisply: 'Things are in the saddle / And ride mankind.' In the most extreme expression of the determinist view, human beings become little more than 'the sex organs of the machine world,' as McLuhan memorably wrote in the 'Gadget Lover' chapter of *Understanding Media*. Our essential role is to produce ever more sophisticated tools - to 'fecundate' machines as bees fecundate plants - until technology has developed the capacity to reproduce itself on its own. At that point, we become dispensable."”
  • “At the other end of the spectrum are the instrumentalists - the people who, like David Sarnoff, downplay the power of technology, believing tools to be neutral artifacts, entirely subservient to the conscious wishes of their users. Our instruments are the means we use to achiever our ends; they have no ends of their own. Instrumentalism is the most widely held view of technology, not least because it's the view we would prefer to be true. The idea that we're somehow controlled by our tools is anathema to most people."”
  • “'Everything that human beings are doing to make it easier to operate computer networks is at the same time, but for different reasons, making it easier for computer networks to operate human beings.' So wrote George Dyson in *Darwin among the Machines,* his 1997 history of the pursuit of artificial intelligence.”
  • “The near-continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to 'vastly overvalue what happens to us *right now,*' as Union College psychologist Christopher Chabris explains. We crave the new even when we know that 'the new is more often trivial than essential.'”
  • “I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to earth, what place would be better to hide.”
    George Dyson's unusually perceptive friend
  • “Our ability to engage in "meditative thinking," which he saw as the very essence of our humanity, might become a victim of headlong progress.”
    Martin Heidegger
  • ““You are right,” Nietzsche replied. “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.””
  • ““The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts,” wrote McLuhan. Rather, they alter “patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”3 The showman exaggerates to make his point, but the point stands. Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.”
  • “"The shift from paper to screen doesn't just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it."”
  • “"Links don't just point us to related or supplemental works: they propel us towarrd them. They encourage us to dip in and out of a series of texts rather than devote sustained attention to any one of them."”
  • “"...books and book reading...are in their cultural twilight. As a society, we devote ever less time to reading printed words, and even when we do read them, we do so in the busy shadow of the Internet."”
  • “The mental life of a sea slug, it seems safe to say, is not particularly exciting.”
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First Sentence edit see section history

In 1964, just as the Beatles were launching their invasion of America's airwaves, Marshall McLuhan published "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man" and transformed himself from an obscure academic into a star.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Prologue: The Watchdog and the Thief

1. Hal and Me
2. The Vital Paths

A Digression: On what the brain thinks about when it thinks about itself

3. Tools of the Mind
4. The Deepening Page

A Digression: On lee de forest and his amazing audion

5. A Medium of the Most General Nature
6. The Very Image of a Book
7. The Juggler's Brain

A Digression: On the buoyancy of IQ scores

8. The Church of Google
9. Search, Memory

A Digression: On the writing of this book

10. A Thing Like Me
Epilogue: Human Elements

Notes
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index

Series & Lists edit see section history

This book is in Well-Designed Book Covers. (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Nicholas G. Carr (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Country: United States
Publication Date: 2010
ISBN: 9780393072228
Page Count: 276

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: QP360 .C3667
  • Dewey: 612.80285

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • What Technology Wants
  • Technopoly
  • You Are Not a Gadget
  • Alone Together
  • Amusing Ourselves to Death
  • iDisorder : understanding our dependency on technology and overcoming our addiction
  • Hooked: The pitfalls of media, technology and social networking

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

   
  • The Brain That Changes Itself
  • The Principles of Psychology, Vol.1
  • Principles of Psychology, Vol. 2
  • The Overflowing Brain
  • The Future of the Book
  • Space Between Words: The Origin of Silent Reading (Figurae Reading Medieval)
  • The Gutenberg Elegies
  • Proust and the Squid
  • The Machine in the Garden
  • Always On
  • Language and the Internet
  • Darwin Among the Machines : The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Helix Books)
  • Distracted
  • Man and the computer (Sir Winston Scott memorial lectures)
  • Scrolling Forward
  • The Computer and the Brain
  • Human Use of Human Beings
  • Computer Power and Human Reason from Judgment to Calculation
  • Technics and Civilization
  • Understanding Media
  • The Singularity Is Near
  • This Is Water
  • Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
  • The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history

   
  • Reinventing Discovery
  • Too Big to Know

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