We may be losing some of the capacity for contemplative concentration that was fostered by a print culture, they say, but we're gaining new and essential ways of working. Others argue that the increasing complexity of our environment means that we need the net as "power steering for the mind". When the Pew Research Centre's Internet & American Life project asked its panel of more than 370 internet experts for their reaction, 81% of them agreed with the proposition that " people's use of the internet has enhanced human intelligence". But many commentators who accept the thrust of his argument seem not only untroubled by its far-reaching implications but are positively enthusiastic about them. Harvard's Steven Pinker, for example, is openly dismissive. Not all neuroscientists agree with Carr and some psychologists are sceptical. So if the technology of printing – and its concomitant requirement to learn to read – could shape human brains, then surely it's logical to assume that our addiction to networking technology will do something similar? The brains of illiterate people, for example, are structurally different from those of people who can read. Carr argues that modern neuroscience, which has revealed the "plasticity" of the human brain, shows that our habitual practices can actually change our neuronal structures. The question that we couldn't answer before now was whether these technologies could also reshape us. There's no doubt that communications technologies shape and reshape society – just look at the impact that printing and the broadcast media have had on our world. It even bothered Plato, who argued that the technology of writing would destroy the art of remembering.īut just because fears recur doesn't mean that they aren't valid. People fretted about printing, photography, the telephone and television in analogous ways. It's easy to dismiss Carr's concern as just the latest episode of the moral panic that always accompanies the arrival of a new communications technology. Who bothers to write down or memorise detailed information any more, for example, when they know that Google will always retrieve it if it's needed again? The web has become, in a way, a global prosthesis for our collective memory. This is partly because he's an engaging writer who has vividly articulated the unease that many adults feel about the way their modi operandi have changed in response to ubiquitous networking. His argument was that our deepening dependence on networking technology is indeed changing not only the way we think, but also the structure of our brains.Ĭarr's article touched a nerve and has provoked a lively, ongoing debate on the net and in print (he has now expanded it into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains). The title of the essay is misleading, because Carr's target was not really the world's leading search engine, but the impact that ubiquitous, always-on networking is having on our cognitive processes. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle." I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. My mind isn't going – so far as I can tell – but it's changing. "Over the past few years," Carr wrote, "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. Two summers ago, the Atlantic published an essay by Nicholas Carr, one of the blogosphere's most prominent (and thoughtful) contrarians, under the headline " Is Google Making Us Stupid?". It turned out to be the blueprint for what eventually emerged as the world wide web. In the summer of 1945, for example, it published an essay by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineer Vannevar Bush entitled " As We May Think". E very 50 years or so, American magazine the Atlantic lobs an intellectual grenade into our culture.