Nicholas Carr’s famous 2008 Atlantic cover story was called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He now has a new book out: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
Benjamin Carlson interviews him here. I’ve excerpted below the first two exchanges:
You write that the Internet encourages a mental ethic of speed and, in effect, distraction. Tell us a little about how you arrived at this idea.
It was originally spurred by my own personal experience. Like a lot of people, I had been using the Net heavily for more than a decade. In fact, every time the Web gained some new capability, I used it more. What I started noticing around 2007 was that I seemed to be losing my ability to concentrate. Not just when I was sitting at a computer. Even when the computer was off and I tried to read a book, to sustain a single train of thought, I found it difficult.
What’s the scale of the technological and cognitive transformation here? When was the last comparable shift?
I think the last one was probably the introduction of the printed book with Gutenberg’s press in 1450. It changed the prevailing mode of thinking in society. For the first time—speaking for society—you had a technology that encouraged people to be attentive, and shielded them from distraction. A mode of thought that was previously restricted to scholars and monks suddenly was encouraged among society at large. The printing press had a very large role in fostering the modes of thought we saw reshaping society in the centuries afterwards.
That was the last time we saw something as dramatic as the introduction of the Internet. What sets the Internet apart from radio and television—earlier mass media—is that the Net doesn’t just process sound and video. It processes text. I think it’s fair to say that the written word is extremely important to our intellectual lives and our culture. Until recently text was distributed through the printed page, which encouraged immersion in a single narrative or argument. With the Net, text becomes something that can be broadcast electronically the way sound and pictures can be. So you begin to see the same habits of thought: distracted, hurried, and (I would argue) superficial. What we’re seeing is a revolution in textual media.
