As a Gen-Y’er who has owed much of her teenaged growth, intellectual expansion, artistic exploration, business development, and social ascendence to the Internet, I should have picked up The Shallows with great skepticism.
But I didn’t.
I came to this book, desperate for answers. A formerly contemplative and prolific reader, my attention span has degraded in recent years to a choppy and insatiable beast. I was disappointed in how uncreative I’ve become at conjuring up ideas on stuff to do with people. I was alarmed at how uninspired my writing has gotten. I could no longer tolerate my intolerance to quiet.
There were others who shared my plight. Carr eloquently describes how he is “no longer thinking the way [he] used to think … [that] he used to find it easy to immerse [himself] in a book or lengthy article [and now this] concentration starts to drift after a page or two. [He gets] fidgety, lose[s] the thread, [and begins] looking for something else to do.”
The Shallows was an addicting read into the physical and cognitive changes that happen in the brain due to our increasing Internet use. However, Carr does address the many counterarguments in favor of our growing Internet use, though the real effects I am experiencing makes it hard for me to accept them.
The 3 most interesting things I’ve learned from The Shallows:
- The Internet is the first media to consolidate multimedia. You used to have to open up a newspaper, turn on the TV, flip through a book, pop in a CD— now, you can do all these things at the click of a button. Sure, it’s convenient, but it lessens our experience of different media. The Internet is also the first media to change other media. TV shows are now spliced with links and sidebar content and newspapers are now shorter and include summaries. Media changes but the Internet is actually forcing them to compete with it and transform in a way to hurt our attention spans even more.
- Books and the written language have trained us to contemplate and think linearly. We are, by nature, easily distracted. It wasn’t until the practice of solitary reading (also learned that in the first few centuries of the written language, it was always read aloud) that our brains actually formed neural pathways to think more logically and be able to concentrate for long periods of time. This chapter on the history of the book alone is worth the price of the book.
- Our brains physically change even after a small amount of exposure to the Internet and despite our assumptions that the Internet allows us to do richer research, repeated experiments reveal that students who do a research paper with traditional paper materials outperform students who do a research paper aided with Internet databases. The tactical aspect of reading (flipping and touching pages) improves our retention of the information. When exposed to small amounts of Internet usage, the students’ attention spans and ability to produce quality papers declined. Other experiments also show that when we are exposed to nature, even for just a small walk or—get this— looking at a photo of nature, our cognitive prowess increases.
I only wished that Carr had included some personal prescriptions, though it made me feel less discouraged when he himself admitted to starting to succumb to his old Internet habits at the end of writing this book. I stayed away from the Internet for a week while reading this book. It took a couple of days to adjust but by the 5th day, I:
- read 2 chapters for my International Law class AND made question and answer study guides for them,
- read a chapter on social development for Cross-Cultural Psychology and created a study guide,
- read a chapter of The Shallows,
- completed two homework assignments for my personal fitness class,
- write half of a personal essay,
- read half a chapter from Half the Sky,
- and read that day’s New York Times.
Might I also add in that I did have a class, had an hour lunch with a friend, and took a 2 hour nap that day? Yeah, it was pretty amazing.
Unfortunately, as soon as I’d introduce a small slice of the Internet back into my life, I could feel my attention span chopping back up into little pieces.
I haven’t figured out the balance yet. I don’t want to banish the Internet from my life but I don’t want it to take over me. Here are a few things I’ve done that have helped me; perhaps they might help you too:
- Imposing a limit on yourself to 2-3 tabs at a time
- Force pleasure reading into your life. You will be surprised at how much time you do have even if you just read right before bed and/or when you get up.
- Have 2-3 days a week where you don’t go online
- Print out articles to read
Go out and read The Shallows. It will amaze and terrify you but knowing the roots of the attention span epidemic is the first step in fighting it.
Related reading: Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr
