Sven Birkerts must be smiling, grimly. Author of the bestselling 1994 cri de coeur “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age,’’ now editor of the journal Agni at Boston University, Birkerts saw it coming. He raised the alarm on the intellectual and cultural effects of digital media long before Google’s corporate motto, “Don’t be evil,’’ took on an Orwellian tone. In fact, before Google even existed. But Birkerts’s argument was literary and anecdotal. He didn’t have the evidence of neuroscience to back him up 16 years ago.
The Internet ate my brain
Nicholas Carr says that our online lifestyle threatens to make us dumber. But resistance may not be futile
Well, he does now.
Technology writer Nicholas Carr’s buzzworthy new book, “The Shallows,’’ marshalls recent research to show, essentially, that Birkerts was right. The Internet works on our brains in such a way that we are in danger of losing our capacity for deep, sustained reading and thought — along with all the cognitive benefits. The Gutenberg mind is morphing into the Google mind.
“The Shallows’’ grew from a splashy 2008 Atlantic cover story titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?’’ Sadly, though, what originated as a provocative and important magazine article has become an unsatisfying book. Yet Carr’s central point remains provocative and urgent, and it’s worth a serious look.
Carr’s argument rests on just three chapters (out of ten). He lays out, first, what we now know about the adult brain’s malleability, or “plasticity,’’ and then draws on a slew of recent studies to make the startling case that our increasingly heavy use of digital media is actually changing us physiologically — rewiring our neural pathways. And not necessarily for the better. “The possibility of intellectual decay,’’ Carr notes, “is inherent in the malleability of our brains.’’
Numerous studies point to the same depressing fact: “[W]hen we go online,’’ Carr observes, “we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.’’ Indeed, given what we know about neuroplasticity, Carr writes, it’s as though the Internet was perfectly designed to “rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible.’’ Not only do we tend to use the Internet obsessively, but “the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli — repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive — that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.’’ As we spend our days on Twitter and Facebook, we stand to lose not just our capacity for sustained concentration, but our capacity for contemplative thought — maybe even our complexly associative long-term memory, the very material of the self.
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