Nicholas Carr lays out his non-Luddite credentials early on in The Shallows—his critical look at ‘how the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember’ (Atlantic, August). In the first chapter, ‘Hal and Me’, he tells us that in 1986 he spent nearly all his savings on one of the earliest Macs, which he used to lug between home and work, and he has since followed the enthusiast’s trajectory right through from that machine’s ‘HyperCard’ program—an early hypertext system—to the heady mix of social networking that is today’s online world.

This introduction is calculated to head off easy criticism by those who would claim Carr is critical of our internet use because he either doesn’t’ get it or doesn’t like it. Clearly, neither is true.

Instead, Carr acknowledges the appeal and myriad opportunities the internet presents, while also wishing to examine the way the medium is changing us. Not surprisingly, Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim ‘the medium is the message’, is central to Carr’s thesis that the advent of the internet represents a wholesale change in the way we think.

To make his point, Carr takes us through a history of our communication. When writing developed in our previously oral culture, he points out, it was some time before we developed the inclination or ability to read quietly to ourselves (instead of simply using the words on the page as a tool for oration). When we did develop this skill—and when the invention of the Gutenberg press meant this option was available to many more in society—the activity changed our minds.

‘For most of history, the normal path of human thought was anything but linear,’ writes Carr. Evolution had taught us to be alert to movement, open to distraction. ‘To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object. It required readers to place themselves at what T S Eliot, in Four Quartets, would call “the still point of the turning world”.’

Such reading encouraged deep thinking, says Carr. ‘In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.’

The internet, with its proven ability to ‘distract’ us (Carr cites studies that point to the disruptive effect on comprehension of the mere existence in a text of hyperlinks), proves a direct threat to this deep, ‘unnatural’ way of thinking—to the Gutenberg way of thinking. At heart, The Shallows is a love song to the book and (another) warning that we are soon to lose not only the book as we know it, but the way of thinking it ushered in. ‘Like our forebears during the later years of the Middle Ages, we find ourselves today between two technological worlds,’ writes Carr. ‘After 550 years, the printing press and its products are being pushed from the center of our intellectual life to its edges.’

To those in the book industry, this sounds a familiar alarm, and Carr’s overview of Google’s Book Search, the Kindle and other ereaders, as well as his imagined future of the book, will be of interest. But to many, the response may well be ‘so what?’ What is so dire about this change? (more…)