The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Having traced the development of modern intellectual technologies, Carr argues that “the way the web has progressed as a medium replays, with the velocity of a time-lapse film, the entire history of modern media” (83). This claim differentiates The Internet’s Impact on Cognition from the impacts of other transformative intellectual technologies. Literacy technologies, for example, developed gradually over hundreds of years, while the Internet—in Carr’s view—is growing and developing before our eyes at an almost unimaginable pace. Carr supports his claim with a short history of the various technologies that the computer and the Internet have consumed and replaced, elaborating that “the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force […] they become progress’s dead ends” (89). As an example, Carr details the decline of print media—newspapers and magazines—and how remaining print publications are using web-style page layouts to hold onto the quickly decreasing readership who have turned to the Internet instead. The decline of print journalism is a repetition of the pattern Carr identified in earlier chapters: As a new intellectual technology arises, the old are made less culturally relevant, albeit slowly. 

Chapter 6 opens with a rhetorical question, “And what of the book itself?” (99). Carr deploys this rhetorical question not only to announce the core concern of Chapter 6 but also to signal The Shallows’s arrival at the present day in the timeline of intellectual history. There’s an inherent irony in using a book to voice concerns about the end of the book, but ultimately the transition Carr sees coming is not necessarily one in which a new technology (the Internet) entirely supplants an old one (the book). Rather, his analysis suggests that the new technology may bleed into the old one, altering its form and expanding its possibilities. The book has been far more resistant to the web’s influence than newspapers and magazines have been, but as e-readers have become less straining on the eyes and more accessible and inexpensive, and inventive web-based writing more popular, the book has begun to lose its cultural capital (99). Carr is quick to point out that this process is slow: “Pundits have been trying to bury the book for a long time” (109). He references writers from as early as 1889 suggesting that books were hopelessly out of date, yet over 100 years later, the publishing industry is still profitable. Of more concern to Carr is the way “some thinkers welcome the eclipse of the book and the literary mind it fostered” (111). He challenges those thinkers’ rejoicing as “the latest manifestation of the outre posturing that has always characterized the anti-intellectual wing of academia” (111). According to Carr, these academics provide an excuse for people to uncritically interact with the Internet “to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought” (112). When Carr makes his concluding statements, he returns to the first-person “we,” reiterating that he isn’t offering this criticism as an outsider but as a fellow Internet adopter: “In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual transition of solitary, single-minded concentration” (114). 

The purpose of Carr’s first-person statement is to bypass defensiveness in his reader, framing himself and his critiques as coming from a fellow victim, or fellow offender, rather than a judgmental outsider. Ending this chapter with the first person reaffirms the rapport he’s built with his audience: “We have cast our lot with the juggler” (114). The phrase “cast our lot” suggests that the choice—whatever its deleterious consequences for human memory and attention span—has been made and is now irrevocable.