The Shallows

Reading The Shallows, it’s difficult not to project your own experiences onto those of Nicholas Carr. He skillfully highlights the many social concerns and challenges that we face as a society moving forward into the digital age. One passage in particular really compelled me to think of the effects this transition has had on the way we function on the most basic level.

“Sometime in 2007, a serpent of doubt slithered into my infoparadise … I missed my old brain.” (13-14)

In this passage, Carr expresses his concern about the effects the Internet and the resources for which it is a platform, which have essentially changed the way he thinks. As his dependency grows, his ability to focus deeply declines. His brain becomes unsatisfied with simply retaining knowledge and instead craves more and more–it needs to be overstimulated in order to feel satisfied. In many ways, he describes the internet as a sort of addiction. And if you think about it, it’s true. As a whole, we are becoming less capable of concentrating on one task at a time. Only a few years ago reading a book from cover to cover on a rainy day was something you did without a second thought. Now, every minute away from the internet seems like a decade of hopeless isolation. Once experienced, the interconnectedness provided to us by the web is hard to give up. And this is all great because moving into the modern age we need to be capable of multitasking and of processing tons of data from multiple sources at a time. But here comes the scary part.. What would happen if this magical device was suddenly taken away from us?

During the past week, many of us were affected by hurricane Sandy. And while people were losing their belongings, their homes, their lives, many of us were sitting at home losing our minds. Why? Because in a split second we went from hyper-stimulation to no stimulation whatsoever. We went from being completely immersed and interconnected with the world to sitting alone in the darkness. And this was only for a few days. What would our society do if we were suddenly deprived of this connection forever? Would we simply revert to the way things were only several decades ago? Or have our minds evolved to be constantly hungry?

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