The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

I am pretty sure a computer wrote this book. Boring, dry and dull from the beginning. There were a few useful nuggets of information in regards to how we are being distracted an an alarming rate and we are finding it harder and harder to concentrate, therefore we aren't promoting deep thinking. We will soon be a world of people who only skim information. I didn't read this book, I listened to it while driving. I was distracted several times and the internet had nothing to do with it.

Carr starts off explaining how the human mind works and then spends time describing the history of print. And, yes, there were good comparisons on when books started arriving early on and how society thought those books were going to stop independent thought. He also included a bit about how clocks made time universal and I never thought about that. For a period of time in our history there was no real time. His point being is that we eventually adapted to time. And, we will adapt to the internet.

But man, he took the long way home to get his point across. He wasn't trying to defend or promote the internet. It seemed he found a bunch information and decided to put that information on several pages. He even explains how he wrote the book. But it seemed to go on and on with no real substance. this will be a good reference book someday.

The interesting part of this book for me is that computers and the internet have changed how we think and how we write. I'm in a strange age group in that I both owned a typewriter as a kid and wrote a few grade school reports by hand, but mostly wrote reports for school on computers, and was already teaching myself html in college. I thought the difference that writing by hand, on the typewriter, or on the computer makes on the style of the writing is particularly interesting since Jennifer Egan says that she drafted the first version of all her novels by hand.

The book seemed a bit disorganized for me though. And it felt insufficiently researched or fleshed out especially in the science section.

I think I have a particularly strange perspective because I only began to read in such a large quantity specifically because as someone with no job or car from 2016-2018, I could get free ebooks and audiobooks from my library. I think since then, my transformation as a reader has been akin to a second college education. I've read about 200 books a year since 2016, including this year, for a total of over 800 books in 4 years. Many of those books were some serious literary tomes- such as the Bible and Moby Dick. So it's easy for me to dismiss the overwrought idea that the internet has made me unable to read serious books and concentrate on them when it's precisely the internet that has increased my reading and understanding of the world.