The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (EPUB)

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Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”―Michael Agger, Slate “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”―from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer―Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic―a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption―and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes―Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive―even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “A thought provoking exploration of the Internet’s physical and cultural consequences, rendering highly technical material intelligible to the general reader.” ― The 2011 Pulitzer Prize Committee”A must-read for any desk jockey concerned about the Web’s deleterious effects on the mind.” ― Newsweek”Starred Review. Carr provides a deep, enlightening examination of how the Internet influences the brain and its neural pathways. Carr’s analysis incorporates a wealth of neuroscience and other research, as well as philosophy, science, history and cultural developments … His fantastic investigation of the effect of the Internet on our neurological selves concludes with a very humanistic petition for balancing our human and computer interactions … Highly recommended.” ― Library Journal”This is a measured manifesto. Even as Carr bemoans his vanishing attention span, he’s careful to note the usefulness of the Internet, which provides us with access to a near infinitude of information. We might be consigned to the intellectual shallows, but these shallows are as wide as a vast ocean.” ― Jonah Lehrer, The New York Times Book Review”This is a lovely story well told―an ode to a quieter, less frenetic time when reading was more than skimming and thought was more than mere recitation.” ― San Francisco Chronicle”The Shallows isn’t McLuhan’s Understanding Media, but the curiosity rather than trepidation with which Carr reports on the effects of online culture pulls him well into line with his predecessor . . . Carr’s ability to crosscut between cognitive studies involving monkeys and eerily prescient prefigurations of the modern computer opens a line of inquiry into the relationship between human and technology.” ― Ellen Wernecke,, The Onion A.V. Club”The subtitle of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition of those published in the 1950s about how rock ’n’ roll was corrupting the nation’s youth … But this is no such book. It is a patient and rewarding popularization of some of the research being done at the frontiers of brain science … Mild-mannered, never polemical, with nothing of the Luddite about him, Carr makes his points with a lot of apt citations and wide-ranging erudition.” ― Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times”Nicholas Carr has written an important and timely book. See if you can stay off the web long enough to read it!” ― Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change”Neither a tub-thumpingly alarmist jeremiad nor a breathlessly Panglossian ode to the digital self, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is a deeply thoughtful, surprising exploration of our “frenzied” psyches in the age of the Internet. Whether you do it in pixels or pages, read this book.” ― Tom Vanderbilt, author, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)”Nicholas Carr carefully examines the most important topic in contemporary culture―the mental and social transformation created by our new electronic environment. Without ever losing sight of the larger questions at stake, he calmly demolishes the clichés that have dominated discussions about the Internet. Witty, ambitious, and immensely readable, The Shallows actually manages to describe the weird, new, artificial world in which we now live.” ― Dana Gioia, poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts”The core of education is this: developing the capacity to concentrate. The fruits of this capacity we call civilization. But all that is finished, perhaps. Welcome to the shallows, where the un-educating of homo sapiens begins. Nicholas Carr does a wonderful job synthesizing the recent cognitive research. In doing so, he gently refutes the ideologists of progress, and shows what is really at stake in the daily habits of our wired lives: the re-constitution of our minds. What emerges for the reader, inexorably, is the suspicion that we have well and truly screwed ourselves.” ― Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class As Soulcraft”Ultimately, The Shallows is a book about the preservation of the human capacity for contemplation and wisdom, in an epoch where both appear increasingly threatened. Nick Carr provides a thought-provoking and intellectually courageous account of how the medium of the Internet is changing the way we think now and how future generations will or will not think. Few works could be more important.” ― Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain About the Author Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Glass Cage, and Utopia is Creepy. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, and Wired. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The Shallows by Nicholas Carr is a book I’ve been wanting to read for years and now that I finally have read it, I think it is a good jumping off point for deeper discussions on how to have it all, the Internet, Alexa and Books! This reads like a cautious warning from 12 years ago that may already be too late in the age of AI!As the author explains, when he was away from the computer, he felt the urge to connect. But unlike the author many of us have kept reading thousands of books and don’t spend all our time surfing the web. We actually do read a book from cover to cover. Hello! Why else would I have taken the time to read this book? lolI found myself disagreeing with the author in places and being intrigued in others. I would say that children do not learn to talk without instruction as the author says. There is a lot of pointing at things, saying their names and teaching how to pronounce and say things properly! Parts of this book are history lessons and some were predictions of what the future might hold. I liked the line that we are “hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.”This book says that we are not going back to the lost oral world although now we talk to Alexa and to our computers so he wasn’t totally right. The author does have a good handle on the history of the Internet and the future of books was fascinating. I like the idea of being able to discuss a book within a book while reading it. I’ve never experienced that. Far too often I get back online to read reviews of a book I’m reading just to feel one with the community. I love reading other people’s thoughts about a book or movie.So the author admits he likes his stream of information just like billions of other minds do. He probably used the Internet to write his book for sure. I think he is overly cautious and doesn’t emphasize the positive aspects of social interactions online like how we have deeper and more meaningful and honest conversations with friends and family online and not as much in the “real” world. What is real anymore? Online life feels very real and meaningful to me.This author does not mention Alexa although he has a brief discussion about AI as it was developing. So this book needs some updates to be currently as relevant as possible.I think personally I’ve become who I am today because of the Internet. And I like who I am now as compared to who I was 22 years ago. I am actually far better educated by reading books I find here and have much deeper conversations with people online. So if anything, the Internet has made me much smarter as far as I can tell. With online life you can really follow your intellectual interests, be entertained and find great smart friends. Let’s not be afraid of technology, let’s use it to change the world for the better. Onward into the future…~The Rebecca Review

⭐“What was so remarkable about book reading was that the deep concentration was combined with the highly active and efficient deciphering of text and interpretation of meaning. The reading of a sequence of printed pages was valuable not just for the knowledge readers acquired from the author’s words but for the way those words set off intellectual vibrations within their own minds.’’‘Intellectual vibrations’?‘’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.’’ (62)This was primarily a religious, essentially Biblical devotion. How experienced?“Even the earliest silent readers recognized the striking change in their consciousness that took place as they immersed themselves in the pages of a book. The medieval bishop Isaac of Syria described how, whenever he read to himself,’’Of course, these were almost overwhelmingly reading religious books, usually the Bible or Greek philosophers. Deep reading. . .“as in a dream, I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.”Wow! Who does this? How significant?“Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn’t involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. That was—and is—the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading. It was the technology of the book that made this “strange anomaly” in our psychological history possible. The brain of the book reader was more than a literate brain. It was a literary brain.” (62)Carr develops this theme throughout – the importance, even essential – process of ‘deep reading’. For example, even the physical form of the brain changes . . .“One of the most important lessons we’ve learned from the study of neuroplasticity is that the mental capacities, the very neural circuits, we develop for one purpose can be put to other uses as well. As our ancestors imbued their minds with the discipline to follow a line of argument or narrative through a succession of printed pages, they became more contemplative, reflective, and imaginative. “New thought came more readily to a brain that had already learned how to rearrange itself to read,” says Maryanne Wolf; “the increasingly sophisticated intellectual skills promoted by reading and writing added to our intellectual repertoire.” The quiet of deep reading became, as Stevens understood, “part of the mind.” (74)Carr emphasizes that this – contemplative, reflective, imaginative – brain is being replaced by the – distracted, shallow brain.“Jordan Grafman explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively. “Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no,” says Grafman. “The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.”Well. . .won’t all this extra information help?“You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.’’ (140)No ability to challenge ideas? Where is Luther, Galileo, Faraday – when we need them?THE WATCHDOG AND THE THIEFOne HAL AND METwo THE VITAL PATHS – a digression on what the brain thinks about when it thinks about itselfThree TOOLS OF THE MINDFour THE DEEPENING PAGE – a digression on lee de forest and his amazing audionFive A MEDIUM OF THE MOST GENERAL NATURESix THE VERY IMAGE OF A BOOKSeven THE JUGGLER’S BRAIN – a digression on the buoyancy of IQ scoresEight THE CHURCH OF GOOGLENine SEARCH, MEMORY – a digression on the writing of this bookTen A THING LIKE ME“What the Net diminishes is Johnson’s primary kind of knowledge: the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give rise to a singular intelligence.’’ (143)Another theme is the difference between human mental processes and computers. . .“The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electrical, and genetic, every aspect of human memory—the way it’s formed, maintained, connected, recalled—has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits—ones and zeros—that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between.’’ (188)Reminds me of the wise man’s illustration of spiritual growth -“So he went on to say: “In this way the Kingdom of God is just as when a man casts seeds on the ground. He sleeps at night and rises up by day, and the seeds sprout and grow tall—just how, he does not know. On its own the ground bears fruit gradually, first the stalk, then the head, finally the full grain in the head.’’ (Mark 4:26)A biological metaphor, not a mechanical one!Carr connects another idea that I had not considered.“As McLuhan acknowledged, he was far from the first to observe technology’s numbing effect. It’s an ancient idea, one that was given perhaps its most eloquent and ominous expression by the Old Testament psalmist:“Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men’s hands.They have mouths, but they speak not;Eyes have they, but they see not;They have ears, but they hear not;Noses have they, but they smell not;They have hands, but they handle not;Feet have they, but they walk not;Neither speak they through their throat.They that make them are like unto them;So is every one that trusteth in them.’’“The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation. The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies. The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, emotion.’’Of course, the psalmist was condemning idols, not technology. Nevertheless, perhaps Carr has a point, maybe we really are ‘worshipping the work of our own hands’.

⭐Esse livro precisa ser impresso em português o quanto antes! É extremamente essencial para os tempos atuais. Eu li a versão de 2011 em português e esse é exatamente o mesmo, mas com um capítulo a mais no final. Apesar de ter sido escrito em 2007-2009, o conteúdo é atual e alarmante. Nicholas nos mostra, com base em vários estudos, como a internet alterou nossa forma de pensar e agir (assim como outras ferramentas criadas no passado, como o relógio e mapa). Hoje em dia, nosso cérebro tem mais dificuldade em se aprofundar em algo, em se concentrar e em se manter focado por muito tempo. O cérebro acostumou-se com estímulos rápidos e superficiais, graças ao que a internet nos proporciona: acesso a milhões de informações em questão de segundos, de forma muito descomplicada. O último capítulo é mais atualizado e aborda bastante sobre os smartphones e suas implicações na nossa mente. É preocupante, estamos nos tornando mais superficiais e reféns desses aparelhos. Me sinto muito privilegiado em ter absorvido esse conteúdo. Mesmo não tendo inglês fluente, consegui entender grande parte dos textos. Sugiro a leitura a todos, principalmente àqueles que estão preocupados e que notaram que suas mentes estão inquietas e que não conseguem se concentrar por muito tempo.

⭐Not found.

⭐Shocking but very interesting study.

⭐Given the title of this book, it would be a shame if it were a shallow read itself. Instead, it is challenging, perceptive and informative. I am enjoying it very much.

⭐Excellent

⭐Great read and insightful.

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