The expansion into book form has involved a lot of superfluous padding – potted histories of printing and other technologies, and sepia-tinted autobiographical fragments – that serves only to fill space when not making actually ridiculous claims. He first put forward this thesis in a 2008 Atlantic article, " Is Google making us stupid?", which is still available online. Ironically, since Carr worries that the internet will stop us reading entire books, there is no need to read his entire book to understand his argument. Yet Carr's portrait of the average internet user as a skimming machine that will respond obediently to any shiny new input is dehumanising in just the same way.
By far the best part of his book is a critique of digital-age metaphors: the assumption that computer "memory" can replace human memory, and the idea of the brain itself as a computer. Yet such self-discipline (the adoption of "filtering strategies", as Palfrey and Gasser put it) doesn't seem to have occurred to Carr: in front of a computer screen, we are for him impotent and without volition, so the only options are to drown in cyberbabble or to "disconnect" completely. This kind of thing is what I would consider basic intellectual ecology in the online age. Recently, I have even managed to purge 95% of my RSS subscriptions while still getting useful things done with the internet. When Carr goes online he complains of constant interruption by email, Twitter and Facebook updates, though I seem to have the option to leave clients unopened or turn off notifications. He insists that hyperlinks "propel" us to other texts, though I find it quite easy not to click on them if I don't want to. Here is a far more nuanced story of a teenage girl's "newsgathering process", which alternates between "grazing" and a "deep dive", when she wants to know more about a particular topic and will indeed read in-depth.įor Carr, though, we are just pitiable slaves to the machine. In Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (375pp, Basic Books, £9.99), by contrast, John Palfrey and Urs Gasser have actually bothered to find out what young people do online, rather than just assuming them to be glazed, distracted skimmers. In other words, people who used the internet regularly had not lost the ability to read books after all.
An experiment showed web novices' brains changing in response to internet use, but it also showed "no significant difference in brain activity" between the novices and a web-savvy control group when both were engaged in "a simulation of book reading". Carr cites a bit of psychology and neuroscience, but he doesn't seem to notice that the study he unveils most triumphantly actually refutes half of his own argument.
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