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
