The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember

The Internet is eroding our capacity for concentration and contemplation, chipping away at our ability to read and think deeply. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that every information technology, whether it's the alphabet or the map or the computer, carries an intellectual ethic - a set of assumptions about the nature of information and intelligence. The mechanical clock demanded that the world be understood in terms of divided and measurable time: it was the ethic of the scientist. The printing press tuned our minds to the supple, linear arguments of individual thinkers: it was the ethic of the writer. The Internet is entirely different. It encourages the rapid, nonlinear collection and processing of many small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is the ethic of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of inputs and outputs, of optimised production and consumption.

Drawing on neuroscience, media theory, and economics, Nicholas Carr argues that our ever-growing dependence on the Internet is not only influencing our behaviour but is actually rewiring the neural circuitry of our brains. It's changing the way we think, perhaps even altering our conception of our selves. The Internet, like the popular information technologies that came before it, is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at surfing and skimming information, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. We are moving from the depths to the shallows.