The Shallows

My first 3 picks put much of the blame for widespread attention capture on greedy actors engaged in a “race to the bottom of the brainstem” (Tristan Harris, former Google employee, became popular opponent of exploitative big tech). 

Although Carr does not shy from that theme, he seems to put much of the responsibility on our own shoulders: it is we who must resist many temptations of convenience in order to preserve our own cognitive strengths, such as creativity. Otherwise, we become shallow thinkers and reliant on AI even for something as characteristically human as wisdom. 

Carr’s follow-up to this… show more.

When The Shallows was first published in 2010 it rang like a five-bell fire alarm, alerting the world about the mostly negative effects of pervasive exposure to the internet. Science journalist Nicholas Carr noticed experiencing an “uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory” and set out to find answers and solutions by thoroughly studying the extant body of neuroscience literature on a wide array of topics including brain plasticity, cognition, and memory. Republished with slight changes as a tenth-anniversary edition in 2020, The Shallows is now even more… show more.

Nicholas Carr of The Atlantic magazine wrote that Google's rich database of information has changed the way we think by taking away our deep research and focus, while affecting our cognition and weakening our ability to think critically. This provocation sparked a very useful debate that continues to this day. In this book, he focuses on attention, knowing that the depth of our thinking is directly related to it. He concludes that in our Net environment, thinking becomes more superficial.