Eggblogg

Book review: The Shallows, How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. By Nicholas Carr

I recently finished reading Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' (subtitle: How the internet is changing the way we read, think and remember'). It's just the sort of book I enjoy - a new way of looking at things, intelligently argued, well researched, accessibly written. (Is it true, I wonder, that we most admire the books we wish we'd have written ourselves?)

Funny how one of the first subjects Carr brings up is Marshall McLuhan, out of favour for years in media studies circles. McLuhan's famous assertion that 'the medium is the message' is, for Carr, very true when it comes to the internet. His central argument is that the technology of the internet not only shapes 'the message' but is actually affecting our neural circuitry. Our brains are changing, and not, in Carr's opinion, for the best.

Gone is our ability to read, in a focused 'lost in a book' way, for any length of time. Gone is our thirst to dig deeper, to see any necessity to go beyond a superficial grasp of things. And gone is our ability to remember, in a digitized world where we no longer need to remember anything.

As a digital marketer, I'm certainly aware of the facts of how people behave on the web. Attention spans are short - if visitors spend over a minute looking at a web page either you are doing a great job of keeping their attention, or your navigation is so poor they can't work out where to click next.

And as a writer I'm aware of all the advice about keeping sentences and paragraphs as short as possible, using simple words and active constructions, subheads and bolding of key words to catch the attention of the skimmers, hyperlinking phrases in the body to encourage click throughs. (The previous sentence was way too long.)

Technology may be turning us all into attention-deficit multitaskers. Although in fact Carr admit that it's not necessarily a bad thing that we are adopting new skills and learning new ways of doing things. It's kind of inevitable. He quotes a 2009 article in Atlantic by Jamais Cascio who suggested that developing new cognitive habits is 'the only viable approach the navigating the age of constant connectivity.' 

But what does worry him is that among the skills we are losing in the process is the capacity for contemplative thought, which he says (backed up by research) is the principal way by which the brain puts down long-term memories - and I mean the kind that grow into human wisdom, not lists of facts to regurgitate on 'Mastermind'. The implication is that we are taking on the characteristics of the very machines we have created: we are seduced by the capabilities of new technology and thereby downgrading all other types of intelligence.

On the one hand this sounds like the stuff of science fiction. On the other, you only have to read the marketing press to know how 'data' has become some kind of holy grail, the key to success - the more data you have on someone, the more efficiently you can market to them, etc. Stats, stats, and data - we are constantly being told that quantifying everything is what matters in business. And yet human knowledge, human intelligence is so much more than data. Real artificial intelligence is still just as far off as it was when I was first studying it in the 1980s.

It's a thought-provoking book, and as an internet evangelist, I did find it quite shocking, but perhaps not entirely surprising. Part of me thinks that technological change and our adaptation to it is all part of the inevitability of human development, like language change, culture shifts and the elimination of certain life-threatening diseases. But the other part of me is disappointed, sad even.

I have always valued thinking time and meditative pursuits, of which writing poetry is certainly one. The idea of taking time to think has never gone down well in a business setting, and in the past I incurred the wrath of bosses who preferred to see people 'looking busy' and rushing around at their job. Much as I love the internet, and it has enriched my life, if it really is 'changing the way we read, think and remember' then we need to be aware of that. 'The Shallows' is fascinating and wide-ranging. Worth buying - but read it on a Kindle at your own risk!

The Shallows website

Nicholas Carr's blog, Rough Type

Blogging platforms - the good, the bad ...

I'm currently working on a book about blogging. Pretty ironic really, because writing about blogging has taken my attention away from my own blog. I'm in a kind of blogging meta-state.

Anyway, I've lifted my head above the parapet to ask you a question - what's your favourite blog platform, and why?

I'm thinking about this a lot - my main website is on WordPress, as are most of my clients' blogs. But Eggblogg is on Typepad. I also have personal blogs on Blogger and a proto-blog on Tumblr which at the moment serves simply as a glorified business card.

It frustrates me that each proprietary system is different enough to make changing between them a bit of a pain. I've got my own views about what's good and bad about the different platforms, and I'm asking a lot of bloggers for their thoughts. So now I'm throwing it open here - any insights you care to share will be much appreciated, but be warned - I may quote you in the book!

Return of the right brain?

In a recent column in Marketing magazine ('Marketing's new mindset') Andrew Walmsley brought up the left-brain right-brain debate. Marketing is changing, he suggests, from being a campaign-dominated activity to one of 'continous activity', thanks mainly to the rise of digital technology which allows for shorter feedback loops and the ability to act in real time. The traditional marketing tactics of repetition and persistence will slowly become obsolete as marketers are now able to measure results immediately and tweak their efforts accordingly.

Although the article claims that marketers "need more than logic to succeed", it's not clear what that missing quality is, other than the ability to "manipulate, analyse and understand data in a way that marketers never had to before." Isn't that still a reliance on data, and presumably the application of logic/reasoning to that data? There's a noticeable lack of any mention of right-brain engagement, such as the application of wisdom, experience or big-picture thinking.

In a footnote to Walmsley's article we are reminded of the theory that "those who are 'left-brained' are said to be more logical, objective and analytical than the 'right-brained', who tend to be characterised as intuitive, subject and thoughtful individuals." Never mind the admission that "the reality is not so black and white", the damage has been done here in the choice of words: the right brain is all about the touchy-feely, fluffy stuff that can't be measured and there's no evidence for, whereas the left-brain deals with facts, data, evidence, reality.

For me, the whole piece was written from a left-brain perspective. For a jaw-dropping exposition of this I highly recommend Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary. The book has certainly convinced me that here in the West in the late 20th/early 21st century we are living in a culture dominated by left-brain thinking, where everything must be measurable, explicable, replicable.

It's the left hemisphere of our brain that seeks to abstract things, to store up information, to classify, but in order to see the wood from the trees it needs the right hemisphere which sees everything in context. The way we make sense of the world is a continuous dialogue between the two hemispheres of the brain. In McGilchrist's view (and he serves up plenty of evidence for this), the right hemisphere has a controlling or co-ordinating function which keeps the tension between the two 'brains' in balance... but in a culture where left-brain functions are held in higher esteem than those of the right, worshipped even, there is a danger that the left-brain can come to dominate.

Or in McGilchrist's terms, the Emissary (left brain) rises up against the Master (right brain) and skews our way of being in the world and our relationship to everything. Because sadly the left hemisphere is "a wonderful servant, but a very poor master."

Now the realisation of this really would mean a 'new mindset' for marketing. But since the issue is a lot, lot bigger than that, how we sell things to people just doesn't seem all that significant in the scheme of things.

Keep it simple if you want to get your message across

On Saturday I saw an interesting comment in the Guardian from a tutor on a creative writing course. She claimed that to write a commercially successful novel you need to keep your language and structure very simple. Simple enough for an 11 year old to understand, since that's the average reading age of adults in this country.

I've never really understood what 'reading age' meant, but can this really be true? To find the answer I went to the website of the National Literacy Trust, where it's stated that in fact one in six adults in the UK have the reading ability expected of an 11 year old, or less. Still not great. But then I followed a link to the University of Nottingham's SMOG calculator where you can paste in samples of text to see just how readable they are. (SMOG stands for Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook!) As benchmarks, they tell us SMOG scores of newspaper editorials. The Sun scores under 14, the Daily Express under 16 and the Telegraph & the Guardian under 18.

I compared two samples - the first from a letter that a client had asked me to edit/redraft, the second was my redraft. Thankfully, my re-write had reduced the SMOG score from 18.5 to 14.3, although it probably could have been even better.

Vocabulary, sentence length and structure aren't the only things to affect readability. Factors such as the font size and typeface, line spacing, layout and surface finish all play a part. If you're interested in knowing more about how to make written material easy to understand I recommend downloading the (free) Readability leaflet from NIACE.

Don't get me wrong - I don't advocate dumbing down. I believe strongly that the only way to improve confidence and skills in reading and writing is to read good writing, and lots of it. It's OK to start with JK Rowling and Dan Brown, but sooner or later the aim should be to lose the waterwings and start swimming with Peter Carey and Cormac McCarthy.

However, as marketers and communicators we're not writing great literature. We have no choice but to reduce complexity, respect readibility factors and keep it simple if we want to get our messages across.

Why I loved Gary Vaynerchuk's 'Crush It!'

Do you ever see those tabloid-shriek business books about how to work less and become a billionaire by using the internet, and think 'oh puh-lease'?' Or get a bit fed up with the self-promote-merchants who scream about how much they LOVE their work, how GREAT their business is doing, etc etc? Or, when you do give in, buy their book/seminar/product you then feel short-changed?

Happily, this blog post is not about that kind of experience. I've just finished reading Gary Vaynerchuk's 'Crush it! Why now is the time to cash in on your passion' and loved it.

Not because it delivers plenty of good, solid advice and ideas based on what Gary has done and learned in the process of building his business, although it does. 

Not because it echoes a number of my own core beliefs, such as the internet being as transformational as the printing press, although it does.

Not because it's to the point, easy to read, witty, and written just as Gary speaks, although it is.

The real reason I loved it, and what made it stand out for me was that it seems an honest book. By that I mean not just authentic, but really walking the talk, and what's more it's in the moment. Just as Gary claims not to ever do a second take on his Wine Library TV, this book seems to have benefited from inconspicuous editing. He admits he dictated the entire book, and that is undoubtedly a major part of its charm.

There are moments of thinking aloud, such as the section on Flickr - "It has a ton of passionate users, although I'm not one of them.. photographs don't speak to my DNA," admits Gary, but by the end of the paragraph he's starting to change his mind. "In fact, now that I think about it, it's insane that I haven't done this already. Anyone who cares about wine should be able to find me on Flickr, so I'd better get onto that."

Crush it! is inspiring, uplifting and great fun. It reminded me of all the things I plan to do but haven't yet. I'd better get onto that.