2026-05-27 - The Shallows by Nicholas Carr ========================================== I seem to recall finding this referenced in the phlog of a FreeBSD user on sdf.org. I checked out the book from my local library. I couldn't put it down! It is extremely relevant to enshittification, illiteracy, and the future of the Internet. And now i can't recommend this book highly enough. One of the most interesting points made was the distinction between working memory and long-term memory, and how the "brain as a machine" metaphor has been just as misleading as a lie. Rather than "freeing up mental resources", outsourcing long-term memory to a computer diminishes our ability to pay attention and think. It makes us shallow and erodes culture. Long-term memory is effectively unlimited and never full. The more we use our own long-term memory, the more we are able to learn, think deeply, be creative, and solve problems. I also found it interesting to read the story Socrates told about the dialog between Egyptian king Thamus and the god Theuth, who is advocating for teaching everyone to read using an alphabet. The king, like Socrates, was skeptical about the value of universal education and literacy. Luddites of the underworld, unite! I have always had a strong preference to read linear writing that is clearly and logically organized. Once in a while, hyperlink cinema can be highly stimulating and entertaining, but i do not enjoy the verbal barrage of word salad presented by stream of consciousness and experimental writing styles. Boo hiss to James Joyce and Harlan Ellison. As an experiment, i will try moving away from a hypertext style of presentation in this log, and using footnotes instead. It's essentially the same information but presented in a different way. I know some people find footnotes distracting too, but my hope is that they will be less distracting than hyperlinks are. I was interested in the concept of "commonplace books" [1]. It sounds similar to my own note-taking system. I find that writing notes forces me to slow down and process the information through multiple channels, which seems to help retention. What follows are excerpts from the book, with my comments in square brackets. Prologue: The Watchdog And The Thief ==================================== In 1964, just as the Beatles were launching their invasion of America's airwaves, Marshall McLuhan published /Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man/ and transformed himself from an obscure academic into a star. Oracular, gnomic, and mind-bending, the book was a perfect product of the sixties... /Understanding Media/ was at heart a prophecy, and what it prophesied was the dissolution of the linear mind. McLuhan declared that the "electric media" of the twentieth century--telephone, radio, movies, television--were breaking the tyranny of text over our thoughts and senses. Our isolated, fragmented selves, locked for centuries in the private reading of printed pages, were becoming whole again, merging into the global equivalent of a tribal village. McLuhan understood that whenever a new medium comes along, people naturally get caught up in the information--the "content"--it carries. ... The technology of the medium, however astonishing it may be, disappears behind whatever flows through it--facts, entertainment, instruction, conversation. When people start debating (as they always do) whether the medium's effects are good or bad, it's the content they wrestle over. What both the enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it--and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society. "The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts," wrote McLuhan. Rather, they alter "patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance." Chapter 1: HAL And Me ===================== The Net has become my all-purpose medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich and easily searched store of data are many, and they've been widely praised and duly applauded. The boons are real. But they come at a price. ... what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. For some people [actually for most people], the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even a little silly--like sewing your own shirts or butchering your own meat. "Sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn't make sense. It's not a good use of my time, as I can get all the information I need faster through the Web." --Joe O'Shea, former student body president, Florida State University, 2008 recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship Chapter 2: The Vital Paths ========================== The conception of the adult brain as an unchanging physical apparatus grew out of, and was buttressed by, and Industrial Age metaphor that represented the brain as a mechanical contraption. As the idea of the unchangeable adult brain hardened into dogma, it turned into a kind of "neurological nihilism," according to the research psychiatrist Norman Doidge. Because it created "a sense that treatment for many brain problems was ineffective or unwarranted," Doidge explains, it left those with mental illness or brain injuries little hope of treatment, much less cure. And as the idea "spread through our culture," it ended up "stunting our overall view of human nature. Since the brain could not change, human nature, which emerges from it, seemed necessarily fixed and unalterable as well." The adult brain, it turns out, is not just plastic but, as James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, puts it, "very plastic." Or, as Merzenich himself says, "massively plastic." The plasticity diminishes as we get older--brains to get stuck in their ways--but it never goes away. The brain is not the machine we once thought it to be. "Plasticity," says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a top neurology researcher at Harvard Medical School, is "the normal ongoing state of the nervous system throughout the life span." Evolution has given us a brain that can literally change its mind--over and over again. The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into "rigid behaviors." Plastic does not mean elastic, in other words. Our neural loops don't snap back to their former state the way a rubber band does; they hold onto their changed state. ... Bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones. "If we stop exercising our mental skills," writes Doidge, "we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead." The mental skills we sacrifice may be as valuable, or even more valuable, than the ones we gain. Chapter 3: Tools of the Mind ============================ The historical advances in cartography didn't simply mirror the development of the human mind. They helped propel and guide the very intellectual advances that they documented. The map is a medium that not only stores and transmits information but also embodies a particular mode of seeing and thinking. What the map did for space... the mechanical clock did for time. For most of human history, people experienced time as a continuous, cyclical flow. Life was, in the words of the French medievalist Jacques le Goff, "dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity." That began to change in the latter half of the Middle Ages. The first people to demand a more precise measurement of time were Christian monks, whose lives revolved around a rigorous schedule of prayer. ... By the fourteenth century, the mechanic clock has become commonplace, a near-universal tool for coordinating the intricate workings of the new urban society. The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. And like the map, it changed the way we thought. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement. ... The clock played a crucial role in propelling us out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment. Every technology is an expression of human will. Our technologies can be divided, roughly, into four categories, according to the way they supplement or amplify our native capacities. * extends physical strength, dexterity, or resilience * extends the range or sensitivity of our senses * enables us to reshape nature to better serve our needs or desires * extends our mental powers (intellectual technologies) Examples of intellectual technologies: * map * clock * typewriter * abacus * slide rule * sextant * globe * book * newspaper * school * library * computer * Internet It is our intellectual technologies that have the greatest and most lasting power over what and how we think. They are our most intimate tools, the ones we use for self-expression, for shaping personal and public identity, and for cultivating relationships with others. Every intellectual technology... embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work. The intellectual ethic of a technology is rarely recognized by its inventors. ... Our ancestors didn't develop or use maps in order to enhance their capacity for conceptual thinking or to bring the world's hidden structures to light. Nor did they manufacture mechanical clocks to spur the adoption of a more scientific mode of thinking. Those were by-products of the technologies. But what by-products! Ultimately, it's an invention's intellectual ethnic that has the most profound effect on us. Language itself is not a technology. It's native to our species. Our brains and bodies have evolved to [communicate and understand] words. Reading and writing [on the other hand] are unnatural acts, made possible by the purposeful development of the alphabet and many other technologies. ... around 750 BC ... the Greeks invented the first complete phonetic alphabet. The Greek alphabet had many forerunners... but linguists generally agree that it was the first to include characters representing vowel sounds as well as consonant sounds. The Greeks analyzed all the sounds, or phonemes, used in spoken language, and were able to represent them with just twenty-four characters, making their alphabet a comprehensive and efficient system for writing and reading. The "economy of characters," writes Wolf, reduced "the time and attention needed for rapid recognition" of the symbols and hence required "fewer perceptual and memory resources." Recent brain studies reveal that considerably less of the brain is activated in reading words formed from phonetic letters than in interpreting logograms or other pictorial symbols. Early in the fourth century BC, when the practice of writing was still novel and controversial in Greece, Plato wrote /Phaedrus/, his dialogue about love, beauty, and rhetoric. In the tale, the title character, a citizen of Athens, takes a walk with the great orator Socrates into the countryside, where the two friends sit under a tree beside a stream and have a long and circuitous conversation. ... "There remains the question," muses Socrates, "of propriety and impropriety in writing." Phaedrus agrees, and Socrates launches into a story about a meeting between the multitalented Egyptian god Theuth, whose many inventions include the alphabet, and one of the kings of Egypt, Thamus. Theuth describes the art of writing to Thamus and argues that the Egyptians should be allowed to share in its blessings. It will, he says, "make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories," for it "provides a recipe for memory and wisdom." Thamus disagrees. He reminds the god that an inventor is not the most reliable judge of the value of his invention: "O man full of arts, to one is it given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that, you, by reason of the tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect." Should the Egyptians learn to write, Thamus goes on, "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." The written word is "a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance." Those who rely on reading for their knowledge will "seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing." They will be "filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom." Socrates, it's clear, shares Thamus's view. ... By substituting outer symbols for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers, he says, preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness. In a purely oral culture, thinking is governed by the capacity of human memory. Knowledge is what you can recall, and what you recall is limited to what you can hold in your mind. The oral world of our distance ancestors may well have had emotional and intuitive depths that we can no longer appreciate. ... When we learned to read, [McLuhan] argued, we suffered a "considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate [person] or society would experience." But intellectually, our ancestors' oral culture was in many ways shallower than our own. Chapter 4: The Deepening Page ============================= [This chapter describes further advances in written language. There used to be no spaces between words, and no standard ordering of words. Adding spaces made reading a less demanding process, freeing up resources to read more "deeply." Then they began breaking up text into paragraphs, chapters, and adding tables of contents, etc. It proceeds to tell the story of Gutenberg.] The growing availability of books fired the public's desire for literacy, and the expansion of literacy further stimulated the demand for books. The printing industry boomed. After Gutenberg's invention, the bounds of language expanded rapidly... The vocabulary of the English language, once limited to just a few thousand words, expanded to upwards of a million words as books proliferated. ... Writers experimented with syntax and diction, opening new pathways of thought and imagination. ... As language expanded, consciousness deepened. [This reminds me of Copeland's point that modern music would sound dissonant to classical listeners. And that future music would sound dissonant to us. Because we have to learn to appreciate new forms of music and acquire a taste for their increased complexity.] Chapter 5: A Medium of the Most General Nature ============================================== It's often assumed that the time we devote to the Net comes out of the time we would otherwise spend watching TV. But statistics suggest otherwise. What does seem to be decreasing as Net use grows is the time we spend reading print publications--particularly newspapers and magazines, but also books. When old technologies are supplanted by new ones, the old technologies often continue to be used for a long time, sometimes indefinitely. Decades after the invention of movable type, many books were still being handwritten by scribes or printed from woodblocks--and some of the most beautiful books continue to be produced in those ways today. Quite a few people still listen to vinyl records, use film cameras to take photographs... But the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. ... That's why the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDs. A particularly striking illustration of how the Net is reshaping our expectations about media can be seen in any library. Although we don't tend to think of libraries as media technologies, they are. The public library is, in fact, one of the most important and influential informational media ever created--and one that proliferated only after the arrival of silent reading and movable-type printing. A community's attitudes and preferences toward information take concrete shape in its library's design and services. Until recently, the public library was an oasis of bookish tranquility where people searched through shelves of neatly arranged volumes or sat in carrels and read quietly. Today's library is very different. Internet access is rapidly becoming its most popular service. Chapter 6: The Very Image of a Book =================================== In a recent address to a group of teachers, Mark Federman, an educational researcher at the University of Toronto, argued that literacy, as we've traditionally understood it, "is now nothing but a quaint notion, and aesthetic form that is as irrelevant to the real questions and issues of pedagogy today as is recited poetry--clearly not devoid of value, but equally no longer the structuring force of society." The time has come, he said, for teachers and students alike to abandon the "linear, hierarchical" world of the book and enter the Web's "world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity"--a world in which "the greatest skill" involves "discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux." [Or in other words, adopting the reasoning of a meth addict.] Although it may be tempting to ignore those who suggest the value of the literary mind has always been exaggerated, that would be a mistake. Their arguments are another important sign of the fundamental shift taking place in society's attitude toward intellectual achievement. [Society can go pound sand. This brings to mind The Marching Morons [2] and Anti-Intellectualism In American Life [3].] Chapter 7: The Juggler's Brain ============================== What can science tell us about the actual effects that Internet use is having on the way our minds work? ... Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators, and Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. It's possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as it's possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that's not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards. With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. At the very least, it's the most powerful that has come along since the book. The Net commands our attention with far greater insistency than our television or radio or morning newspaper ever did. Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it. ... If the slow progression of words across printed pages dampened our craving to be inundated by mental stimulation, the Net indulges it. It returns us to our native state of bottom-up distractedness, while presenting us with far more distractions than our ancestors ever had to contend with. Research by Ap Dijksterhuis, a Dutch psychologist who heads the Unconscious Lab at Radboud University in Nijmegen, indicates that... breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple with a problem, bring to bear information and cognitive processes unavailable to conscious deliberation. We usually make better decisions, his experiments reveal, if we shift our attention away from a difficult mental challenge for a time. But Dijksterhuis's work also shows that our unconscious thought processes don't engage with a problem until we've clearly and consciously defined the problem. If we don't have a particular intellectual goal in mind, Dijksterhuis writes, "unconscious thought does not occur." The Net's cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again. One other finding of the study [by Gary Small and two colleagues at UCLA] sheds light on the differences between reading Web pages and reading books. The researchers found that when people search the Net they exhibit a very different pattern of brain activity than they do when they read book-like text. Book readers have a lot of activity in regions associated with language, memory, and visual processing, but they don't display much activity in the prefrontal regions associated with decision making and problem solving. Experienced Net users, by contrast, display extensive activity across all those brain regions when they scan and search Web pages. The need to evaluate links and make related navigational choices, while also processing a multiplicity of fleeting sensory stimuli, requires constant mental coordination and decision making, distracting the brain from the work of interpreting text or other information. Whenever we, as readers, come upon a link, we have to pause, at least for a split second, to allow our prefrontal cortex to evaluate whether or not we should click on it. The redirection of our mental resources, from reading works to making judgments, may be imperceptible to us--our brains are quick--but it's been shown to impede comprehension and retention, particularly when it's repeated frequently. As the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex kick in, our brains become not only exercised but overtaxed. Our ability to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction remains largely disengaged. The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory to long-term memory and weave it into conceptual schemas. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms the major bottleneck in our brains. Unlike long-term memory, which has a vast capacity, working memory is able to hold only a very small amount of information. ... According to Sweller, current evidence suggests that "we can process no more than about two to four elements at any given time with the actual number probably being at the lower [rather] than the higher end of this scale." Those elements that we are able to hold in working memory will, moreover, quickly vanish "unless we are able to refresh them by rehearsal." Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that's the challenge involved in transferring information from working memory into long-term memory. By regulating the velocity and intensity of information flow, media exert a strong influence on this process. When we read a book, the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by the pace of our reading. Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer all or most of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of schemas. With the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from one faucet to the next. We're able to transfer only a small portion of the information to long-term memory, and what we do transfer is a jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream from one source. The information flowing into our working memory at any given moment is called our "cognitive load." When the load exceeds our mind's ability to store and process the information--when the water overflows the thimble--we're unable to retain the information or to draw connections with the information already stored in our long-term memory. We can't translate the new information into schemas. Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains shallow. Because our ability to maintain our attention also depends on our working memory--a high cognitive load amplifies the distractedness we experience. [Or in other words, meth addict styles of reasoning.] Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that's the intellectual environment of the Internet. Chapter 9: Search, Memory ========================= Erasmus's recommendation that every reader keep a notebook of memorable quotations was widely and enthusiastically followed. Such notebooks, which came to be called "commonplace books," or just "commonplaces," became fixtures of Renaissance schooling. Every student kept one. By the seventeenth century, their use had spread beyond the schoolhouse. The popularity of commonplace books ebbed as the pace of life quickened in the nineteenth century, and by the middle of the twentieth century memorization itself had begun to fall from favor. What had long been viewed as a stimulus for personal insight and creativity came to be seen as a barrier to imagination and then simply a waste of mental energy. ... Today, people routinely talk about artificial memory as though it's indistinguishable from biological memory. The shift in our view of memory is yet another manifestation of our acceptance of the metaphor that portrays the brain as a computer. The analogy has a simplicity that makes it compelling... But there's a problem with our new, post-Internet conception of human memory. It's wrong. Subsequent studies confirmed the existence of short-term and long-term forms of memory and provided further evidence of the importance of the consolidation phase during which the former are turned into the latter. In the 1960's, University of Pennsylvania neurologist Louis Flexner made a particularly intriguing discovery. ... The two types of memory entail different biological processes. String long-term memories requires the synthesis of new proteins. Storing short-term memories does not. The formation of long-term memories, in other words, involves not only biochemical changes but anatomical ones. That explained, Kandel realized, why memory consolidation requires new proteins. Proteins place an essential role in producing structural changes in cells. The hippocampus provides an ideal holding place for new memories because its synapses are able to change very quickly. Over the course of a few days, through a still mysterious signaling process, the hippocampus helps stabilize the memory in the cortex, beginning its transformation from a short-term memory into a long-term one. Neuroscientists also theorize that the hippocampus helps link new memories with older ones, forming the rich mesh of neuronal connections that give memory its flexibility and depth. Many of the connections between memories are likely forged when we're asleep and the hippocampus is relieved of some of its other cognitive chores. ... When sleep suffers, studies show, so, too, does our memory. Old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In face, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. Those who celebrate the "outsourcing" of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor. The proponents of the outsourcing idea also confuse working memory with long-term memory. When a person fails to consolidate a fact, an idea, or an experience in long-term memory, [they are] not "freeing up" space in [their] brain for other functions. In contrast to working memory, with its constrained capacity, long-term memory expands and contracts with almost unlimited elasticity, thanks to the brain's ability to grow and prune synaptic terminals and continually adjust the strength of synaptic connections. "Unlike a computer," writes Nelson Cowan, an expert on memory who teaches at the University of Missouri, "the normal human brain never reaches a point at which experiences can no longer be committed to memory; the brain cannot be full." Evidence suggests, moreover, that as we build up our personal store of memories, our minds become sharper. We don't constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence. The Web is a technology of forgetfulness. Culture is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as "the world's information." It's more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers. Chapter 10: A Thing Like Me =========================== In an article in the /Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease/, three prominent research psychiatrists wrote that ELIZA, with a bit of tweaking, could be "a therapeutic tool which can be made widely available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centers suffering from a shortage of therapists." But, as Weizenbaum was astonished to discover, the people who "talked" with his program had little interest in making rational, objective judgments about the identity of ELIZA. They /wanted/ to believe that ELIZA was a thinking machine. They /wanted/ to imbue ELIZA with human qualities--even when they were well aware that ELIZA was nothing more than a computer program following simple and rather obvious instructions. ... In their /Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease/ article, the three psychiatrists hadn't just suggested that ELIZA could serve as a substitute for a real therapist. They went on to argue, in circular fashion, that a psychotherapist was in essence a kind of computer: "A human therapist can be viewed as an information processor and decision maker with a set of decision rules which are closely linked to short-range and long-range goals." In simulating a human being, however clumsily, ELIZA encouraged human beings to think of themselves as simulations of computers. The reaction to the software unnerved Weizenbaum. It planted in his mind a question he had never before asked himself but that would preoccupy him for many years: "What is it about the computer that has brought the view of man as a machine to a new level of plausibility?" In 1976, a decade after ELIZA's debut, he provided an answer in his book /Computer Power and Human Reason/. To understand the effects of a computer, he argued, you had to see the machine in the context of mankind's past intellectual technologies, the long succession of tools that, like the map and the clock, transformed nature and altered "man's perception of reality." Such technologies become part of "the very stuff out of which [a person builds their world]." What makes us most human, Weizenbaum had come to believe, is what is least computable about us--the connections between our mind and our body, the experiences that shape our memory and our thinking, our capacity for emotion and empathy. The great danger we face as we become more intimately involved with our computers--as symbols flickering across our screens--is that we'll begin to lose our humanness, to sacrifice the very qualities that separate us from machines. The only way to avoid that fate, Weizenbaum wrote, is to have the self-awareness and courage to refuse to delegate to computers the most human of our mental activities and intellectual pursuits, particularly "tasks that demand wisdom." Alienation, [McLuhan] understood, is an inevitable by-product of the use of technology. Whenever we use a tool to exert greater control over the outside world, we change our relationship with that world. Control can be wielded only from a psychological distance. author: Carr, Nicholas G., 1959- detail: tags: book,history,non-fiction,political title: The Shallows Footnotes ========= [1] Commonplace book [2] The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth [3] Anti-Intellectualism In American Life Tags ==== book history non-fiction political