The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2010

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Digression 1

Chapter 3-Digression 2

Chapters 5-6

Chapter 7-Digression 4

Chapter 10-Afterword

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Background

Authorial Context: Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr is known for his writing at the intersection of technology, sociology, and business. His debut book, Does IT Matter?, published in 2004, analyzes the role of artificial intelligence and computer engineering in business strategy. Four years later, Carr published The Big Switch, which is about cloud computing and its effects on society. In August 2008, The Atlantic published Carr’s feature article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is an expansion of those original arguments and was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. Subsequent editions of The Shallows include discussions of social media, smartphones, and human emotion. Following The Shallows, Carr published The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (2014), which analyzes how automation technology has affected human psychology and society.

Carr maintains a blog where he comments on contemporary developments in technology, and in 2016, he published a compilation of his articles and essays titled Utopia Is Creepy. Continued scientific research into the impact of the Internet on human cognition has complemented and confirmed the arguments Carr presented in The Shallows. While Carr’s scholarship is widely applauded, some critics have argued that Carr’s writing encourages a stagnant, pessimistic attitude toward new technology, offering much in the way of analysis but little in actionable advice.

Historical Context: The Timeline of Internet Developments in 2009-2010

In August 2008, The Atlantic published Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” which was an intellectual precursor to The Shallows. At the time of the original article’s publication, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter were less than three years old. The Apple iPhone had only been launched the year before, and Instagram and Pinterest had not yet come online. New technologies of information and connection have proliferated so rapidly that Carr felt the need to add an Afterword to the 2011 paperback edition outlining some of the changes that had occurred since the book’s hardcover release in 2010:

Facebook membership […] doubled from 300 million to 600 million; the number of text messages processed every month by the typical American teen […] jumped from 2,300 to 3,300; sales of e-readers, tablets, and smartphones […] skyrocketed […] elementary schools have rushed to put iPads in their students’ hands (228).

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The Shallows was written in and about the period called Web 2.0, the second stage of Internet development that shifted Internet use from static HTML pages to content creation and circulation platforms. The term was coined in 1999 but fully established itself at the Web 2.0 Conference put on by O’Reilly Media and MediaLive in 2004. At this conference, Web 2.0 was described as a stage in Internet development where programs are built on the Internet itself—the cloud—rather than a physical desktop, and the programs’ content is created by users.

At the time of The Shallows’s original publication, Web 2.0 had fully subsumed Web 1.0, but Web 2.0 technology had not yet been integrated into K-12 education. Smartphones (both Apple and Samsung) had only recently launched, and the pricing for these phones was not accessible for lower-middle-class and working-class adults and their families.