Book review : The shallows.
What the internet is doing to our brains.
Note this is partly a book review and partly an exposition of my thoughts on the subject based on thinking exercises I’ve had during my spiritual training in my youth.
I first saw this book, scrolling through the corner of my eye as I was looking for a comic for my fiancee’s nephew. Funny enough how karma works. The yellow blue cover combination turned a casual glance into a squint as I scanned through its intro and assessed the proposition of the book. Funny enough, little did I know at the time, but I was experiencing exactly what the book is all about. In my quest for finding the right book for the new little guy my brain had processed over 50 books trying to find the right one. It didn’t help that I had never met the kid and didn’t know if he’d be a Marvel or a DC guy. All I had going for me that he was 9 years old, but I was determined to unravel the maze. As I skipped/scrolled/ and burrowed through the rabbit hole of suggestions that ‘the everything store’ kept throwing at me I had felt a certain sense of helplessness and the anguish of finding a needle in the haystack, albeit subconsciously. When I later read the book and came across Carr’s emphasis on the medium itself and not necessarily the content being primarily responsible for fundamentally altering neural pathways in our brain did I become cognizant of the my subconscious’s registers. I became more aware of my ‘hungry or hankering mind’, a machine which needed nay demanded inputs to make an optimal decision.
We’ve all experienced first hand the gold fish awareness, where we can only hold focus on something for a few seconds. We wait for an app to load and while it’s doing that we check out a new insta post or fire off a quick message. We’ve become like an operating system, feeling the urge to context switch to keep us interested and believing like we’re maximizing our efficiency. Are we though? It remains to be seen in my opinion.I believe this is because of how much time we’re spending on our smart phones, we come to behave like them. If you are the 5 most people you associate with, then we’re 3/5th’s the average of our iPhone, iPad and mac, even more so during the pandemic. We do have a higher overall rate of discoveries and inventions, but when is the last time that a fundamental law of the world was discovered, or a new element was developed. Now an argument could be made that those were relatively low hanging fruit that were a lot easier to attain, and while there is an element of common sense to that, I submit that the way tiktok, vine, insta are taking hostage the minds of our next generation should be cause for pausing and reflection. We seem to have mistaken standing on the shoulder of giants to be giants ourselves. Just because you’re able to spin up a virtual machine somewhere doesn’t mean you understand the mechanics behind it. It is impressive, truly, how much we’re able to ‘do’ these days but equally scary of how much we don’t know about what we do.
I sometimes run a thought experiment, mostly in my dreams, I unwittingly walk through a time tunnel and am brought into the 19th century. How would my life experience go? How many of the fundamental breakthroughs of the last century I’d be able to implement and bring humanity forward. If I’m being honest, perhaps I could ‘reinvent’ the electric generator, I mean there’d hardly be use for a Fourier transform or quick sort in that century, at least not right away. I agree with the author’s assessment that we have lot of ‘breadth’ and quick knowledge but lack the deep understanding.
I distinctly remember in childhood where I would pore over tomes of book and pickup a topic and beat it to death finding all the literature I could lay my hands on. Now it’s an article or 2, jumping to a conclusion and defending it until the sun sets.
To be contd…
