While toiling over what you are now reading, I scanned my three email accounts dozens of times and wrote a handful of emails; I responded on my cellphone to a score of text messages from my girlfriend and kids; I checked the balance of my bank account to see if a promised payment had arrived . . . and so on.
Yet I’m relatively unwired. I don’t do Twitter, Facebook or Skype. And I did all this digital darting hither and thither even though I found the subject I was supposed to be writing about—Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows”—quite absorbing. And disturbing. We all joke about how the Internet is turning us, and especially our kids, into fast-twitch airheads incapable of profound cogitation. It’s no joke, Mr. Carr insists, and he has me persuaded.
The Internet has transformed my professional and personal lives in many positive ways. Writing about, say, the biology of aggression, I can find more high-quality information in minutes than I could have dug up in weeks when I was beginning my science-writing career in the early 1980s. I can post material online and start receiving feedback—not all of it inane—within minutes, all the while conversing with colleagues, friends and family members by email. Who would regret these advances?
But Mr. Carr shows that we’re paying a price for plugging in. Many studies “point to the same conclusion,” he writes. “When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.”
Mr. Carr calls the Web “a technology of forgetfulness.” The average Web page entices us with an array of embedded links to other pages, which countless users pursue even while under constant bombardment from email, RSS, Twitter and Facebook accounts. As a result, we skim Web pages and skip quickly from one to another. We read in what is called an “F” pattern: After taking in the first two lines of a text, we zip straight down the rest of the page. We lose the ability to transfer knowledge from short-term “working” memory to long-term memory, where it can shape our worldviews in enduring ways.
The multitasking that is enabled, and encouraged, by our laptops and hand-held devices is supposed to boost our productivity but often diminishes it, Mr. Carr says. Students who Net-surf during class, even if their searches are related to the professor’s lecture, remember less than unconnected students. (That settles it: I will never again let my students have open laptops in class.) Verbal SAT scores—which measure reading and writing aptitude—have dropped over the past decade as Internet usage has skyrocketed.
What we gain from the Internet in breadth of knowledge—or rather, access to knowledge—we lose in depth. Mr. Carr quotes the playwright Richard Foreman’s lament that we are becoming “pancake people—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.” We are losing our capacity for the kind of sustained, deep contemplation and reflection required to read—let alone write—serious works of fiction and nonfiction. I sense these changes in myself, and I suspect that a lot of other people do, too.
For many, the pros of connectedness vastly outweigh the cons. My 86-year-old father, who bought an iPhone this year, loves it. No matter where he is, he exults, he can check sports scores and stock prices, read his favorite pundits online, and stay in touch with his kids and grandkids. When I told him that I was reviewing a book about how the Internet is making us dumber, he said: “It makes me feel smarter!”
I expected a similar reaction from my teenage son and daughter. Like most American kids, they commune with friends via text messages and Facebook updates (email is so passé), and they spend endless hours trolling the Web for odd videos and cool music. But rather than dismissing Mr. Carr’s thesis as old-fogeyish, as I expected, they confessed that their dependence on the Internet sometimes worries them. My son would like to cut back on his online time, but he fears isolation from his friends.
My own Internet usage feels compulsive, addictive. Which raises another matter posed by Mr. Carr: Are we really choosing these information technologies of our own free will, because they improve our lives? Our BlackBerrys and Droids offer us infinite options, but such virtual freedom masks a deeper loss of control. Mr. Carr quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aphorism: “Things are in the saddle / and ride mankind.” What Emerson said about railroads and steam engines is even truer of today’s information technologies.
In a poignant “digression” toward the end of “The Shallows,” Mr. Carr addresses an obvious question: If the Internet is so distracting, how did a blogger, Facebooker and Tweeter like him manage to write a 276-page book? Answer: He and his wife moved to a mountain town in Colorado that lacked cellphone and broadband Internet service. He stopped blogging and cut back on instant messaging, Skyping, emailing. He gradually started to feel “less like a lab rat and more like, well, a human being. My brain could breathe again.”
As he finished the book, Mr. Carr plugged right back in. And upgraded: He bought a Wi-Fi gadget that lets him stream music, movies and videos from the Internet to his stereo and television. “I have to confess: it’s cool,” he writes. “I’m not sure I could live without it.”
Source: WSJ.com
