The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian media theorist who coined the phrase “the medium is the message” in his seminal work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term “global village” in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. McLuhan’s critiques of electronic media focused on radio and television; however, he theorized about a future evolution of electronic media that would be an extension of consciousness, subsuming all other technologies—a description eerily similar to the Internet. 

Carr introduces McLuhan’s critique of electronic media in the Prologue of The Shallows as an example of how scholars have cataloged technology’s effects on cognition early in human history. He also uses McLuhan’s famous statement that “the medium is the message” as a frame for discussing how the medium, not just the content, of the Internet exerts influence over its users. McLuhan argued that tools like television and radio (and hammers and plows) numb “whatever part of the body they ‘amplify’” (210). Carr applies McLuhan’s critique of tools to support his own argument that the Internet numbs the cognitive functions it supposedly supports.

Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press in the mid-15th century in Germany. Gutenberg “created small, adjustable molds for casting alphabetical letters of uniform height but varying width [that] could be arranged quickly into a page of text for printing [using] an oil based ink that would adhere to the metal type” (68). After printing approximately 200 copies of the Bible, Gutenberg had to sell his invention back to Fust to cover his debt. Fust, in turn, leveraged the letterpress into an indispensable publishing machine across Europe. 

Gutenberg’s letterpress enabled printed media to be created and distributed quickly and cheaply, in turn making reading and writing a common practice across the globe. Prior to the press, print media had to be hand-copied by scribes, an expensive and time-consuming process. Carr uses the example of the Gutenberg press to illustrate how intellectual technologies become ubiquitous, and therefore culturally important, where they are made convenient, small, and cheap. Carr connects the Gutenberg press to the shift that occurred when personal computers made the Internet widely accessible.

Kandel, born in 1929, is a Nobel-prize-winning psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and professor whose groundbreaking research focused on memory and learning. After graduating from New York Medical School in 1952, Kandel joined the US National Institutes of Health, where he explored the role of the hippocampus in neurophysiology. After creating the Division of Neurobiology and Behavior at New York University Medical School, Kandel began a series of experiments on the sea slug Aplysia. The Aplysia experiments led to several important discoveries: Reflex processes change with repetition, the encoding of long-term memory involves the creation of new proteins initiated by serotonin, and processing information from short-term to long-term memory yields the creation of physical synaptic connections. 

Carr explains Kandel’s discoveries in memory and learning to demonstrate how the Internet as a medium works with the human brain’s learning process. The Internet relies on repeated, rewarded behavior, which is the same kind of behavior that changes brain physiology according to the Kandel experiments. Carr uses Kandel’s research to support his argument that the Internet’s disruption of memory processes has physical consequences in the human brain.

Turing (1912-1954) was a British mathematician, cryptanalyst, and theoretical computer scientist who theorized the universal machine, a predecessor to the modern computer. Turing worked as a cryptanalyst during World War II, where he “played a crucial part in cracking the codes of Enigma, the elaborate typewriter that the Nazis used to encipher and decipher military commands […] [helping] turn the tide of the war and ensure an allied victory” (81). Turing suggested that his universal machine, a programmable computer, would make it possible to perform many different functions with a single machine. Turing theorized that his universal machine could only be limited by its speed; the faster a computer could perform a program’s calculations, the more useful and effective the computer could become. Carr connects Turing’s concerns about processing speed to the advancements in processing that modern computers have seen, arguing that as computers have become faster, they have absorbed other machines and media.

Taylor (1856-1915) was a mechanical engineer whose experiments on steel workers in Philadelphia led to an ethic for industrial productivity called scientific management, focused on standard operating procedures and timed tasks. Taylor, as an early career factory manager, documented his workers as they accomplished routine tasks, determining a routine (an algorithm) for the most cost-efficient process for each task. Taylor then trained each worker on the optimum procedure, rather than expecting workers to learn on the job, and he saw his profits increase. Taylor called his system scientific management, as he used a stopwatch to time each separate part of a procedure and rework it until the most efficient process could be found, the “one best method” (150). Carr describes how Google operates on Taylor’s principles of scientific management, imbuing the Internet with Taylor’s ethic of industrial hyper efficiency.

Page is a computer scientist and businessman who, with fellow Stanford alum Sergey Brin, co-founded Google and invented its eponymous search engine in 1996. Page conceived the search engine through an analogy to academic citations: “[T]he more citations a paper garners, the more prestige it gains […] earning a citation from a paper that has itself been much cited is more valuable than receiving one from a less cited paper” (153-54). The Google search engine categorized its database of all the links on the Internet based on the relevancy and traffic of each page. Google, originally funded through venture capital dollars, soon developed an ad revenue auction system that tied advertising income to relevant search engine results. Page “has from the start viewed Google as an embryonic form of artificial intelligence […] ‘Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google’” (172). Carr notes that “Google, as the supplier of the Web’s principal navigational tools, also shapes our relationship with the content that it serves up so efficiently” (156). Carr analyzes Page’s perspective on human learning and the role of the Internet as an example of how business interests have shaped human cognition through the structure of the Internet.