The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

The Shallows is structured loosely in the style of a classical argument, derived from Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, composed in the fourth century BCE. The classical argument has five components: the hook, the context, the claim, the proof, and the conclusion or call to action. In classical style, the conclusion, or peroratio, wins the audience to the speaker’s argument through pathos, appeals to emotion, and an image or example that summarizes the complete argument. For his peroratio, Carr first uses the example of ELIZA, the basic language computer program that captured America’s hearts to the point that its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, became a critic of artificial intelligence and humanity’s reliance on technology. In the context of The Shallows, ELIZA illustrates how intellectual technologies develop, change society, and can threaten human empathy. 

Carr’s Epilogue similarly references Edexcel, a computer program that grades students’ writing using artificial intelligence. Edexcel, like ELIZA and Google, is an example of how the assumption that human brains work like computers leads to developments that may do humanity more harm than good. In Carr’s estimation, Edexcel’s engineers assume that judging human writing is a mechanical task, easily replicated by a computer, in the same way that Larry Page assumes human memory can be replaced by Google. Carr concludes the original text of The Shallows with a return to 2001: A Space Odyssey, creating symmetry in the book and leaving the reader with a symbolic image: “[P]eople have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine” (224). Though the text addresses The Internet’s Impact on Cognition, the peroratio looks forward to the next step in intellectual technology: artificial intelligence. ELIZA, Edexcel, and HAL are all compelling as peroratio elements because each represents how people lose their humanity, empathy, and wisdom to unchecked, uncriticized artificial intelligence. 

The Afterword to the paperback edition continues this pathological appeal, encouraging readers to join Carr and other writers in pushing back against “the Net.” For Carr, this pushback is not about abstaining from Internet use altogether—rather, he encourages readers to think critically about how the Internet influences their thinking. He acknowledges that “people seem to be looking for ways to loosen technology’s grip on their lives and thoughts” while also pointing out how technology use has only grown since The Shallows’s original publication (226). Carr concludes the Afterword with the image of himself and other thinkers in a small boat against the overwhelming tide of unchecked Internet use, inviting the reader to join them. This image is a summary of Carr’s rhetorical strategy across the book: framing himself as a fellow traveler with the reader while demonstrating the authority of the scientists, writers, and thinkers whose work supports his perspective.