Response to the Shallows

Even before I began reading Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, I had started suspecting that something was happening to my brain. In recent months, I had noticed a change in the way that I am able to focus and retain information. My memory is not what it used to be either. I read in an article that a person's peak age is at 23years old. At this age a person's brain functions to the best of its ability. After that, things start to go downhill and the brain's capability greatly diminishes. Myself being 24 years old, I figured that the experiences I was having was a a result of this. But in reading Carr's book, I have started making connections between my "symptoms" and my relationship with the internet. My brain is changing and the primary cause of this change is the internet. Like Bruce Friedman and Philip Davis, I have lost the ability to remain concentrated on one text in its entirety. Once an avid reader, I now put off reading even the books I am interested in. I skim or scroll as fast as I can, immediately anticipating that their is something else waiting for me to read. And like many of the people mentioned in the chapters, the internet has become my only source of information. In fact, I google anything and everything. Carr's believes that his own brain has begun emulating a computer in the way that it processes information. It streams through data so that it can acquire as much as it can from one text before it readily moves on the next. He coins this idea with the term "scatterbrain". He remembers the days when he would make visits to the library and surround himself with hundred of books, all waiting to be read. I remember those days too. I once had to research begonias for my fifth grade science fair. How time consuming to have to look through an assortment of books to find the information I needed. Information that could have well been on a simple Wikipedia page. To think of researchers and scholars, back in 1970's- how difficult must it have been for them without the internet. Carr writes "..the books whispered to me in their dusty voices. We are not going anywhere" (12). Nope, they sure weren't going anywhere. That must've been quite satisfactory for scholars and researchers, to have material that was not constantly being updated at a rate that is almost impossible to keep up with. Of course we have information overload! The minute I refresh my page its already been updated at least five times! Okay, I am exaggerating. But while Carr points out the negative impact of the internet, he also reports on the beauty of it. The internet allows us to connect with others; a network of relationships and a community is formed where people share ideas and form conversations that shape their thinking. It exposes people to concepts they would otherwise never knew existed. And like Friedman and Davis I would agree I wouldn't have it any other way.