COVER STORY

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

For When: A tangled web you weave

by Andrew Thompson

Published: Jun 16, 2010


(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Should you find yourself still thirsty after the following brief review, you'd do well to blame the Internet. The compression of long, complex ideas into tiny doses is print media's way of trying to stay relevant in an age of snippets. This is how far-reaching the neuro-psychological effects of the Internet are, argues Nicholas Carr in his endlessly insightful book on how the web has changed not only how we read and consume online, but how we think offline, and how pre-web technologies (like alt-weeklies) have changed their models in response to ever-more-frenzied brains.

Carr's argument is a temperate one, and he gracefully praises the Internet's immense usefulness while avoiding brash criticisms. But his argument is powerful: The history of Western thought henceforth, he argues, has been toward contemplation and deep-thinking, which he also refers to as "linear" thought — that is, a Westerner opened a book, consumed its entire argument and context and, through the process of silent reading, meditated on its contents. The Internet, however, presents the strongest rupture to this historical arc we have yet seen — an arc Carr brilliantly chronicles from oral tradition to printing press to the present, providing a wonderfully concise primer on how the West came to consume information as it does — because of the web's omnipresence and its ability to supplement so many of the linear vehicles of thought we once frequently used, like television, radio and books. Oh, and newspapers.

W.W. Norton, 276 pp., $26.95, June 7

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