Published in the Jan. 22, 2014 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek
This year’s Silicon Valley Reads program will launch Jan. 22 with a talk by technology writer Nicholas Carr of his bestseller The Shadows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. The book, which was nominated as a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, is perfect for the Silicon Valley, a place internationally famous for playing a major role in the development of the most sophisticated information transit system in the history of humankind.
I plan to attend the Heritage Theater in Campbell to hear Carr discuss his book, one of two selected for the 2014 Silicon Valley Reads program. But I have to confess I’m not sure that I buy into the author’s central premise that the Internet is causing people to lose their ability to concentrate and analyze information. Carr’s reasoning is faulty in blaming the medium of the Internet for the breakdown of our mental powers.
As a professional writer who worked for a technology-focused news service for several years and witnessed the rapid public acceptance of the Internet during the 1990s, I see the Web as a boon to the democratization and distribution of information to a broad audience. The Internet has also evolved into a more interactive information experience for a worldwide audience, enabling a wider variety of information to be accessed than traditional printed media could ever allow. The Internet empowers readers to download and read, for example, the book The Shallows on their Kindle devices, watch a YouTube video of Carr giving a lecture about his book, listen to an MP3 audio of Carr discussing his book on an NPR interview, and engage in dynamic dialogue with other readers through social media about what they think of The Shallows. The plethora of so many more information interactions through the Internet enables the possibility of more ways people can learn about The Shallows — and share their opinions about the book.
What Carr is doing is nothing new in human history. No doubt when neolithic humans first started to paint pictures of their hunts on cave walls, critics in the tribe cried out in alarm that this newfangled medium of artistic imagery would ruin the minds of young people, causing them to stop using their imagination. Many centuries later, Socrates, that worrywart of ancient Athens, started the scare on technological advances on storing and distributing information in written form. The philosopher rued the invention of books — papyrus scrolls back then — claiming that this newfangled thought-recording medium would “create forgetfulness” in the soul and warning his fellow Greeks not to trust in “external written characters.” Socrates would be shocked if he might visit the Morgan Hill Library and see the thousands of published volumes — including Plato’s “Phaedrus” where his very lamentations about books are recorded.
Two centuries after the invention of the modern printing press by Johann Gutenberg, 17th century essayist Robert Burton complained that the vast number of published books were a ruination for the mind by increasing “chaos and confusion” in the number of new ideas dispersed. The telegram was a forerunner to the Internet as a Satan-spawned information technology system. People were aghast at the near instant speed of communication from this electronic contraption, with one doctor claiming that the “pelting of telegrams” would result in mental illness. Radio and TV in the 20th century were claimed as culprits in softening the brain through mindless entertainment and, ironically considering Socrates’s warnings, diverting children from reading books.
The Internet is a tool, and like every tool, this powerful technology can be both wisely used or foolishly abused. With search engines like Google, the Internet provides us with virtually instantaneous access with our home and office computers, notebooks, smart phones and tablets to far more information than we could ever possibly find in any library.
Carr is correct and the Internet is indeed changing our brains. But the truth is, every source of information changes our brains…. including books, magazines and newspapers, radio, phonograph records, CDs, cinema and television. Where Carr gets it wrong in The Shallows is that he forgets that it’s not about the medium, it’s about the message. Just like if you want to be physically healthy, you need to choose quality food to consume and limit your consumption of potato chips and cookies, so your information diet requires you to make smart choices on what content you consume and put in your brain. It requires discipline to feed your mind a nutritious information diet.
Browsing the Internet, we have a choice of selecting websites that can either stimulate the soul or waste our time by idle Web surfing. Carr’s blaming the Internet for allegedly making us stupid is stupid in itself. In the end, it’s not the medium that matters. It’s the quality of the content we select – including books, magazines, newspapers, TV, and radio – that ultimately shapes our minds and impacts our lives.
