The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. The theme of the book is neural plasticity, neural plasticity and neural plasticity. And I love it. Period (but may be at times he does go over board). This book is a follow up of his famous 2008 essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (This is a great place to start before reading the book). I have seen so many people do (and I have done it myself) this "F" reading:
"Studies have tracked the movement of readers’ eyes and revealed that Web readers typically do not read line-by-line, the way they would if they were reading a printed text. Instead, their eyes trace out a pattern resembling the letter F. The eyes typically begin by following a few lines all the way across, then skim part-way across a few more lines before drifting downward along the left-hand side of the text. Jakob Nielsen, a Danish Web usability expert who conducted some of the early eye-tracking studies, puts it succinctly: “How do users read on the web? They don’t.”
"Studies have tracked the movement of readers’ eyes and revealed that Web readers typically do not read line-by-line, the way they would if they were reading a printed text. Instead, their eyes trace out a pattern resembling the letter F. The eyes typically begin by following a few lines all the way across, then skim part-way across a few more lines before drifting downward along the left-hand side of the text. Jakob Nielsen, a Danish Web usability expert who conducted some of the early eye-tracking studies, puts it succinctly: “How do users read on the web? They don’t.”
People love the internet and no wonder, so many were very critical about this book:
Steven Pinker - here:
"For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by clear benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying. Other activities in the life of the mind, like philosophy, history and cultural criticism, are likewise flourishing, as anyone who has lost a morning of work to the Web site Arts & Letters Daily can attest.
Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience."
Not many people know about a website called Arts & Letters Daily leave alone reading it. The ground reality doesn't reflect Pinker's wish of people using the web to enhance knowledge. The distractions offsets the benefits of web as a knowledge repository.
Ben Casnocha - here:
"Some of the most successful consumers and producers of intellectual bits on the Internet -- guys like Tyler and Andrew Sullivan -- spent 30-plus years pre-Internet reading long books and establishing the foundation of knowledge upon which their bits sit. Me? I've grown up on the web. I haven't read all the Great Books. My model is more a mix of books and bits. I do believe the bits will cohere in the long-run into a kind of foundational knowledge of the sort Tyler got from books, but perhaps the books/bits ratio for me should be different than his at this stage."
"For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by clear benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying. Other activities in the life of the mind, like philosophy, history and cultural criticism, are likewise flourishing, as anyone who has lost a morning of work to the Web site Arts & Letters Daily can attest.
Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience."
Not many people know about a website called Arts & Letters Daily leave alone reading it. The ground reality doesn't reflect Pinker's wish of people using the web to enhance knowledge. The distractions offsets the benefits of web as a knowledge repository.
Ben Casnocha - here:
"Some of the most successful consumers and producers of intellectual bits on the Internet -- guys like Tyler and Andrew Sullivan -- spent 30-plus years pre-Internet reading long books and establishing the foundation of knowledge upon which their bits sit. Me? I've grown up on the web. I haven't read all the Great Books. My model is more a mix of books and bits. I do believe the bits will cohere in the long-run into a kind of foundational knowledge of the sort Tyler got from books, but perhaps the books/bits ratio for me should be different than his at this stage."
This is very true but the future generations might lack depth of that intellectual foundation. What we assimilate from the bits is mostly cursory knowledge. It's very hard for bits to replace books but paradoxically at times bits do simplifies an idea or theory making for anyone to grasp easily. Finding those bits in the ocean of web needs patience. Further, after finding the bits, reading it without getting distracted is possible only in quite contemplation but it's oxymoronic on web.
Johnan Lehrer - here:
"Carr makes many important, timely and eloquent points about the cultural losses that accrue with the arrival of new technologies. (This seems like an apt place to add that Carr is an awesome writer; The Shallows was full of graceful prose.) I'm a literary snob, and I have a weakness for dense novels and modernist poetry. I do worry, like Carr, that the everywhereness of the internet (and television before that) is making it harder for people to disappear down the worm hole of difficult literature. This is largely because the book is a quiet medium, and leaves much of the mind a bit bored. (This helps explain why many mind wandering paradigms give undergrads readings from War and Peace; Tolstoy is great for triggering daydreams, which suggests that literature doesn't always lead to the kind of sustained attention that Carr desires.)".
I was most disappointed by Lehrer review. Carr never refutes anything about the benefits of web like enhanced multi tasking skills. But the point of the book is we will lose the traits of deep contemplation and self reflection at the expense of multi taksing. While we are at it, why do we need multi-tasking? Computers are much better even today at multi tasking than we are. So why enhance our multi-taksing skills? Do we really need it? Unless, we are planning to train everyone to be Drone pilots for a perpetual war, we don't need multi tasking and we should stop getting carried away by it's flamboyance. We need to preserve what makes us human's unique and what computers can never emulate - our creativity, our deep thoughts, our ability to synchronize ideas and honing morality. We should stop kidding ourselves trying trade this gift for multi-tasking.
Clay Shirky - here:
I am big fan of Shirky's cognitive surplus speech (and his new book) but it's a hope not a fact. I hope, his hope will be true. Nicholas Carr book warns us to be prudent while Shirky's book oozes with optimism. I personally like to heed Carr's message.
The benefits of internet are immense but it does comes with a cost:
1. Given that current society either ridicules or oblivious to self reflection, metcognition et al, probably its going to get worse as internet perpetuate hedonism and chaos of quasi-knowledge.
2. Will there ever be Picasso, Adam Smith or David Hume again? (David Brook's 2009 article "The End of Philosophy" )
3. Is it safe to have the foot prints of humanity on a flash drive? What will be left for future archeologist? (Great article from New Scientist - Digital Doomsday: End of Knowledge)
Reading a book is fast becoming victim of creative destruction. Carr equates reading to meditation so eloquently:
"To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single static object. It required readers to place themselves at what T.S.Eliot, in Four Quartets, would call "the still point point of the turning world." They had to train their brains to ignore everything else going on around them, to resist the urge to let their focus skip from one sensory cue to another. They had to forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter their instinctive distractedness, applying greater "top-down control" over their attention. "The ability to focus on a single talk, relatively uninterrupted," writes Vaughan Bell, a research psychologist at King's College London, represents a "strange anomaly in the history of our pyychological development."
At the end of the day, it comes down to how we use (or abuse) any new technology. The truth is we are all excited by the immense potential and repository of knowledge unleashed on the internet. In this excitement, most tend to forgot it's shortcomings and how much we abuse it. It's prudent to listen to Nicholas Carr's very important message. Internet is an addiction which surreptitiously sneaks upon us and this fact can never be understood without self reflection. Sadly, self reflection is not even in the vicinity of current society.
Although, we like to believe that the wisdom of crowds will increase exponentially with the processing power of computers (Moore's law), history and current state of society proves otherwise. Paradoxically, web might expedite the genesis of lone geniuses all over the globe. There will be always exceptions, people who weave the web elegantly. They might be the only intellects of the future. I think this famous lines by Margaret Mead will stay alive for generations to come.
"Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has."
Johnan Lehrer - here:
"Carr makes many important, timely and eloquent points about the cultural losses that accrue with the arrival of new technologies. (This seems like an apt place to add that Carr is an awesome writer; The Shallows was full of graceful prose.) I'm a literary snob, and I have a weakness for dense novels and modernist poetry. I do worry, like Carr, that the everywhereness of the internet (and television before that) is making it harder for people to disappear down the worm hole of difficult literature. This is largely because the book is a quiet medium, and leaves much of the mind a bit bored. (This helps explain why many mind wandering paradigms give undergrads readings from War and Peace; Tolstoy is great for triggering daydreams, which suggests that literature doesn't always lead to the kind of sustained attention that Carr desires.)".
I was most disappointed by Lehrer review. Carr never refutes anything about the benefits of web like enhanced multi tasking skills. But the point of the book is we will lose the traits of deep contemplation and self reflection at the expense of multi taksing. While we are at it, why do we need multi-tasking? Computers are much better even today at multi tasking than we are. So why enhance our multi-taksing skills? Do we really need it? Unless, we are planning to train everyone to be Drone pilots for a perpetual war, we don't need multi tasking and we should stop getting carried away by it's flamboyance. We need to preserve what makes us human's unique and what computers can never emulate - our creativity, our deep thoughts, our ability to synchronize ideas and honing morality. We should stop kidding ourselves trying trade this gift for multi-tasking.
Clay Shirky - here:
I am big fan of Shirky's cognitive surplus speech (and his new book) but it's a hope not a fact. I hope, his hope will be true. Nicholas Carr book warns us to be prudent while Shirky's book oozes with optimism. I personally like to heed Carr's message.
The benefits of internet are immense but it does comes with a cost:
1. Given that current society either ridicules or oblivious to self reflection, metcognition et al, probably its going to get worse as internet perpetuate hedonism and chaos of quasi-knowledge.
2. Will there ever be Picasso, Adam Smith or David Hume again? (David Brook's 2009 article "The End of Philosophy" )
3. Is it safe to have the foot prints of humanity on a flash drive? What will be left for future archeologist? (Great article from New Scientist - Digital Doomsday: End of Knowledge)
Reading a book is fast becoming victim of creative destruction. Carr equates reading to meditation so eloquently:
"To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single static object. It required readers to place themselves at what T.S.Eliot, in Four Quartets, would call "the still point point of the turning world." They had to train their brains to ignore everything else going on around them, to resist the urge to let their focus skip from one sensory cue to another. They had to forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter their instinctive distractedness, applying greater "top-down control" over their attention. "The ability to focus on a single talk, relatively uninterrupted," writes Vaughan Bell, a research psychologist at King's College London, represents a "strange anomaly in the history of our pyychological development."
At the end of the day, it comes down to how we use (or abuse) any new technology. The truth is we are all excited by the immense potential and repository of knowledge unleashed on the internet. In this excitement, most tend to forgot it's shortcomings and how much we abuse it. It's prudent to listen to Nicholas Carr's very important message. Internet is an addiction which surreptitiously sneaks upon us and this fact can never be understood without self reflection. Sadly, self reflection is not even in the vicinity of current society.
Although, we like to believe that the wisdom of crowds will increase exponentially with the processing power of computers (Moore's law), history and current state of society proves otherwise. Paradoxically, web might expedite the genesis of lone geniuses all over the globe. There will be always exceptions, people who weave the web elegantly. They might be the only intellects of the future. I think this famous lines by Margaret Mead will stay alive for generations to come.
"Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has."
Slate recommends some really "cool" software to minimize distractions:
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