Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains has changed the way I see schooling.
I’ve long engaged an inner battle between electronic and paperback teaching. I pulled my first grader from school this September, hoping I could jump-start his reading. Each week we trekked to the library and checked out Ikea bags full of books. We spent hours every day cuddled on the couch, reading everything from Winnie the Pooh to the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History. I coached and I coaxed, but often I wondered if we were going about it the wrong way. My homemaking was going to pot while my homeschooling overran the roost; and for the first few months, my son remained a reluctant reader. I wondered if I couldn’t just invest in some sensational website, plug-in my pupil, and watch his reading ignite.
Homeschooling friends whom I deeply respect were employing such resources with impressive results. “My four-year-old is reading,” more than one of them attested. “He begs to go on the computer and read.” It sounded attractive. My six-year-old liked me to read to him; but guaranteed, he was never lobbying to read a book to me.
The Shallows convinced me to stay my course.
From historical perspective and scientific data, Nicholas Carr presents evidence sufficient to support Susan Wise Baue’rs bold claim:
Reading is mentally active.
Watching a video is mentally passive.
Writing is labor-intensive.
Clicking icons is effortless.
Print that stays still and doesn’t wiggle, talk, or change colors makes the brain work hard at interpretation. Print that jumps up and sings a song . . . doesn’t make the brain work at all. . . .
All children prefer ease to effort. It seems reasonable to us to limit their exposure to the easier way until the harder way has been mastered. . . .
In the early grades, the brain develops more quickly than at any other time. Connections are made. Neural pathways are established. . . . the brain is mapping out the roads it will use for the rest of the child’s life. . . . It is vital that the child become fluent in reading and writing during the elementary years—and the brain development required for this fluency is markedly different from that used for comprehending video and computer images.
(Bauer, A Well-Trained Mind, 198-99)
Carr’s findings concur with Bauer’s caution. He describes his own enraptured entanglement in technology:
Reading online felt new and liberating . . . . Hyperlinks and search engines delivered an endless supply of words to my screen, alongside pictures, sounds, and videos. . . . Headlines streamed around the clock through my Yahoo home page and my RSS feed reader. One click on a link led to a dozen or a hundred more. New emails popped into my in-box every minute or two.
(Carr, The Shallows, 15-16).
Several years into the Internet deluge, Carr observed “that the Net was exerting a much stronger and broader influence over me than my stand-alone PC ever had. . . . The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing” (Ibid., 16). He struggled to concentrate on long, printed books. He rued his lost ability to “[stroll] through long stretches of prose” (Ibid., 5). “I get fidgety,” he confessed, “lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text” (Ibid., 6).
Sound familiar? It did to me. Reading Carr’s metaphor felt like staring myself in truth’s mirror: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface on a Jet Ski” (Ibid., 7).
The Internet, Carr explains, was designed precisely for that purpose: to help readers quickly cover a vast expanse of knowledge. It broadens information availability beyond anything previously possible and connects users across the world. I talk with my parents, who are missionaries in the Congo, from my computer desk in Canada. I compile my family history from public records collections, digitized and searchable, thanks to the Net. I blog and shop, plan family reunions and home school parties, order library books, skim Facebook, and even discovered The Shallows . . . online. Undoubtedly, these technological possibilities have furthered human progress and convenience.
Nevertheless, reading on the Internet and curling up on the couch with Crime and Punishment are two very different experiences, and neuroscience is showing that they differently wire our brains.
The brain’s plasticity enables regression as well as growth. The trails we blaze in our psyches depend on the tasks we undertake and the tools we employ. “If we stop exercising our mental skills,” Carr quotes research psychiatrist Norman Doige, “we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead” (Ibid., 35). In other words, if we quit reading books and only read blogs, our brain prunes its book-reading paths to make room for the blog-reading ones.
Reading print on physical pages requires a different set of mental tools than scanning print online, and Carr emphasizes,
What we’re not doing when we’re online . . . has neurological consequences. Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don’t fire together don’t wire together. As the time we spend scanning Web pages crowds out the time we spend reading books, as the time we spend exchanging bite-sized text messages crowds out the time we spend composing sentences and paragraphs, as the time we spend hopping across links crowds out the time we devote to quiet reflection and contemplation, the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart. The brain recycles the disused neurons and synapses for other, more pressing work. We gain new skills and perspectives but lose old ones.
(Ibid., 120)
As frightening as it is to contemplate a world of intellectual jet-skiers, it is scarier still to realize how much more than reading depth is at stake. We may be sacrificing to technology our very humanity itself.
Carr relates the anecdote of Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA. The 1960s rudimentary natural-language processor corresponded with users, re-stating their typed statements in “banal, open-ended questions or comments” (Ibid., 203). The calculated replies seemed so transparently computerized, Weizenbaum was shocked by the public’s response. Even highly educated professionals were enraptured by ELIZA, saying things like, “It understands me” (Ibid., 205). When psychotherapists suggested outsourcing their burgeoning workload to ELIZA, Weizenbaum responded by writing Computer Power and Human Reason, published in 1976. Carr recounts Weizenbaum’s injunction:
The great danger we face as we become more intimately involved with our computers—as we come to experience more of our lives through the disembodied symbols flickering across our screens—is that we’ll begin to lose our humanness, to sacrifice the very qualities that separate us from machines. The only way to avoid that fate, Weizenbaum wrote, is to have the self-awareness and the courage to refuse to delegate to computers the most human of our mental activities and intellectual pursuits, particularly “tasks that demand wisdom.”
(Ibid., 208)
Obviously this issue is far from clear-cut, and Carr is the first to admit it. To write The Shallows, he cancelled his social media accounts, set his email to check just once a day, and downgraded his internet connection to DSL. “For months,” he admits, “my synapses howled for their Net fix” (Ibid., 199). Eventually, dormant neural pathways revived and he managed to research and write an entire book. Project complete, though, he owned he’d jumped back into the milieu of social media, blogging, and Web search (Ibid., 200).
After all, we live in a media-driven world. Though I will teach my first-grader to read using library books on my lap, to enter the world’s Great Conversation, we’ll need the Internet and a laptop. It’s like David Malter says of Reb Saunders in Chaim Potok’s The Chosen: “It is a pity he occupies his mind only with Talmud. If he were not a tzaddik he could make a great contribution to the world. But he lives only in his own world” (Potok, The Chosen, 141).
We may not be able to change a world by choosing isolation, no matter how flighty that world’s trending technology renders our focus. Yet, for all his separatism, Reb Saunders contributes something significant to the world, after all: He gives the world his son. Danny’s intellectual gifts burst beyond the bounds of his family’s Hasidism, and Reb Saunders knows he will not succeed him in the rabbinate. Saunders raises his son to know what he fears books will never teach him: the realm of wisdom and human suffering he can only understand from experience. When Danny abandons the ministry to pursue a psychology career, his father mourns, but remarks: “Let my Daniel become a psychologist. I have no more fear now. All his life he will be a tzaddik. He will be a tzaddik for the world. And the world needs a tzaddik” (Ibid., 267).
So does our world today need tzaddiks: children who not only text and tweet and skim the superficial, but also children who feel, empathize, think deeply, and embody wisdom. I know no better way to explore humanity than to embrace it in real-life experience . . . and in the deep, uninterrupted study of real, great books.
Someday, I’ll permit myself and my son to spend more time online. For now, we’ll sacrifice Starfall to scuba dive beyond the shallows.
