Like A Guy On A Jet Ski

     A reader of my previous post, about embracing e-book technology, has pointed me to a book by Nicholas Carr called The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Taking Marshall McLuhan's famous adage that "the medium, rather than its content, is the message" as his starting point, Carr asserts, as McLuhan did, that every new medium changes us in powerful but often hidden ways.
     However, even people who are wary of the Net's ever-expanding influence "rarely allow their concerns to get in the way of their use and enjoyment of the technology...the computer screen bulldozes our doubts with its bounties and conveniences."
     This admonition echoes McLuhan's warning that the effects of technology "do not occur at the level of opinions and concepts, but alter patterns of perception" steadily and without any resistance. "They alter our mental habits," according to Bruce Friedman, who has been writing about computers since the early 2000s, "so that I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print."
     A university professor Carr interviewed, comments that his thinking has taken on a "staccato" quality. He quickly scans and "skims" online text, his habit to do the same thing when it comes to reading offline text (i.e. books, magazines and newspapers) as well. Another professor writes that she can't get students to read whole books anymore. "They're becoming skimmers. Sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn't make sense to them." Her students apparently feel they can get all the information they need faster through the Web.
     More and more people, Carr points out, are using their browsers for banking, paying bills, making appointments, booking travel and holidays, buying tickets to entertainment events, purchasing personal and household items, sending invitations and announcements, reading and writing e-mails, texts, scanning headlines, blog posts, articles, Twitter feeds; for checking Facebook, watching You Tube and video streams, downloading music, or simply wandering from link to link, sometimes for hours.
     "The Net has become our all-purpose medium," Carr says. "When using it we feel engaged, useful, productive, entertained, and often as though we're getting smarter." The feelings are intoxicating...so much so that they distract us from the Net's deeper "cognitive consequences."
     Indeed, according to Carr, the more people use the World Wide Web, the more they fight to stay focused on longer pieces of writing, to the point that some worry that they're "becoming scatterbrains," Carr himself musing nostalgically that "once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
     For the last five centuries, Carr observes, ever since Gutenberg's printing press made book reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science, and society. As supple as it is subtle, it's been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism. "It may," he says, sounding an ominous note, "soon become yesterday's mind."
     A fascinating, thought-provoking and (perhaps for some) frightening book--particularly those of us wondering about the Net's effects on our own mental habits--it's well worth a look. At 220 pages it's not too long, and it's not an e-book!
     I'd write more, but my Jet Ski is waiting...

     The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. W.W. Norton & Company, 2010