The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember 

Nicholas Carr. Atlantic Books, 2010.

A book like this forces you to read it in small bites in order to understand and consider Carr’s observations.

Carr offers a very detailed study of ... what it says on the tin (how the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember). Careful scientific and psychological studies show that our brains physically change in response to what we do with them. Because internet technology (typified by Google) is designed to encourage us to jump from one thing to another quickly via hypertext links, related stories, images, etc., internet users progressively lose the ability for deep thought, concentration on one subject, reasoning things to a logical conclusion, silent contemplation, and so on.

He includes a survey of the development of reading. Interestingly enough, at the point where he discusses the ancient and mediaeval world and the transmission of texts, he makes some very ignorant blunders.

“The scribes didn’t pay much attention to the order of the words in a sentence [...]. In spoken language, meaning had always been conveyed mainly through inflection, the pattern of stresses a speaker places on syllables, and that oral tradition continued to govern writing. In interpreting the writing in books through the early Middle Ages, readers would not have been able to use word order as a signal of meaning. The rules hadn’t been invented yet.” (p. 61)

This is simply nonsense. He is confusing “inflection” with “intonation”. The word “inflection” is often used to mean the same as “intonation”, but when dealing with Latin and other languages, it means that the form of the word (typically its ending) changes in order to signify its function in the sentence. That is the reason why word-order in Latin and other inflected languages is much less important than it is in English, French, etc.: you could tell the meaning of the sentence from the forms of the words.

Less importantly, he says, p. 62: “... most literate Greeks and Romans were happy to have their books read to them by slaves.” As a matter of fact, only a tiny minority of literate Greeks or Roman owned slaves who could read Greek or Latin. I could continue with further examples, but it doesn’t really affect the argument of the book so I won’t.

Carr exposes the real problem with technology today – it’s not the speed and type of content it can deliver making our lives more efficient, enjoyable, informative, etc. etc., but actually the medium itself (TV, mobile phone, internet etc.) determining how we now think and work. I am already a child (actually adult, as this change took place in my adulthood) of spellcheck, cut-and-paste, fast forward, rewind, and instant access on the go, and I expect others to think and behave like me.

Funnily enough, the expectation to adapt to technological change is so strong with my grown-up children that after a year of pushing me to change my Windows phone, they clubbed together and bought me an iPhone 6 for my birthday. They argued that this type of phone was more intuitive and easier to use for old people like myself, because we don’t understand how all these things work! Secretly, I have already found I can do things on my iPhone 6 that I couldn’t do on my Windows phone, and so, slowly, I too am evolving new habits.