The Shallows

Internet companies are in fierce competition to make people’s lives easier, to shift the burden of problem solving and other mental labor away from the user and onto the microprocessor.

Even as the larger system into which our minds so readily meld is lending us its powers, it is also imposing on us its limitations.

Our willingness, even eagerness, to enter into what Doidge calls “a single, larger system” with our data-processing devices is an outgrowth not only of the characteristics of the digital computer as an informational medium but of the characteristics of our socially adapted brains.

There’s growing evidence that our brains naturally mimic the states of the other minds we interact with, whether those minds are real or imagined. Such neural “mirroring” helps explain why we’re so quick to attribute human characteristics to our computers and computer characteristics to ourselves.

Electronic media “are so effective at altering the nervous system because they both work in similar ways and are basically compatible and easily linked.

Norman Doidge explains that “the computer extends the processing capabilities of our central nervous system” and in the process “also alters it.”

Research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.

Our tools end up “numbing” whatever part of our body they “amplify.” When we extend some part of ourselves artificially, we also distance ourselves from the amplified part and its natural functions.

“We shape our tools,” observed the media scholar John Culkin in 1967, “and thereafter they shape us.”

The tight bonds we form with our tools go both ways. Even as our technologies become extensions of our-selves, we become extensions of our technologies.

Of all popular media, a book is probably the one that has been most resistant to the Net’s influence.

The Net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively.

The constant distractedness that the Net encourages is very different from the kind of temporary, purposeful diversion of our mind that refreshes our thinking when we’re weighing a decision.

The Net 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.

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.

Of the four major categories of personal media, print is now the least used, lagging well behind television, computers, and radio.

When we’re online, we’re often oblivious to everything else going on around us. The real world recedes as we process the flood of symbols and stimuli coming through our devices.

The Net provides a high-speed system for delivering responses and rewards—“positive reinforcements,” in psychological terms—which encourage the repetition of both physical and mental actions.

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.

The Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.

The Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.

The Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions.

If, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet.

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.

When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium’s physical form; it injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed.

Traditional media, even electronic ones, are being refashioned and repositioned as they go through the shift to online distribution.

Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.

“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.”

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.

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.