Save The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

The Shallows is an expansion of Carr's 2007 article in The Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The question with a book of this derivation is always: does it achieve more than the article did, or is it just a puffed up excuse to gain from the notoriety of the original piece, now freely available on the Internet? To that question, I answer that it is indeed more than the original piece. It provides much greater depth of detail for the brain science research that centrally informs the book, and he also expands on the nature and history of deep reading, in a way that I (someone who is doing research in this field) think is quite deft and responsible. In a sense, the earlier magazine article was really a book masquerading as a magazine article, whereas these days most books are magazine articles masquerading as books.

That said, The Shallows is somewhat less than the original Atlantic article in that Carr, as he approaches the end, falls into the most predictable sort of romantic nostalgia. We're becoming machines. The machines are taking our souls away. The Internet is compromising our integrity as humans. Machines are colonizing our minds. Soon they will be more interesting than we are, just like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I've heard this all before! Certainly, a man as clever and as hard-working as Nicholas Carr could have thought a little harder.

(An aside: Perhaps he's proving his point that we've already lost our ability to think deeply. Or perhaps he's DISproving his point that going to country--Carr had to "get away from it all" to write this book--helps us to be contemplative whereas cities only distract us.)

We need people who care about the things books have done for us and continue to do for us who can *also* think beyond the nineteenth century. We can't leave this to the machine people. So, I end up in the middle on this book: 3 stars. The first 80% is good but it fails to deliver a "where we go from here..." Let the good parts inspire the rest of us to take up where Carr has left off.Get more detail about The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.