Speaker 1 Joining us now on the line from Denver, Colorado. Nicholas Carr, he  is the author of The Shallows, what the internet is doing to our brains. He's also  a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. Nicholas, it's good to  have you on the program tonight. How you doing? I'm doing fine. Pleasure to be  here. Glad to hear it. We love to quote Marshall McLuhan on this program, not  just because he's a great Canadian, but this happens to be the happens to be  the 100th anniversary of his birth. So I want to start there by quoting something  he wrote 1964 when he said the spoken word was the first technology by which  man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. And I guess I want to use that quote to get us looking back into the history of this  before we get to all of the modern applications of the internet after the spoken  word, how did other advancements affect, in your view, how we saw our world?  

Nicholas Carr - Well, I think you can, you can trace the influence of technology  and tools on the way human beings think all the way back to, for instance, the  map. Today, we hardly even think of the map as a tool. It's so, so commonplace.  But if you think back back in pre history, before the map was invented, the way  people understood where they were and where they were going was purely  through their sensory perception, through what they saw around around them.  As soon as you have the introduction of this of the map, you suddenly also have an abstract representation of space, a picture of space. And obviously, there are  all sorts of practical uses for maps, but what, what historians of maps tell us is  that this, this technology, changed the way people think it gave us, in general, a  more abstract mind. We began to pay more attention to the abstract patterns  that lay behind what we saw and what we heard. And you see something similar, I think, much later, with the invention of the mechanical clock. And here too,  before the mechanical clock came around, people's perception of time was as  purely as a natural flow. When you have the mechanical clock, suddenly that  flow is broken up into tiny, perfectly measurable units, seconds, minutes, hours.  And what happens again is beyond the practical uses of the clock, you get a  more scientific way of thinking introduced to the human mind, we suddenly pay  a lot more attention, attention to measuring things precisely and to cause and  effect. So every time we have one of these new, what I call intellectual  technologies that come along and change the way we gather information, or the  way we look at the world, or the way we communicate with each other, we also  see either subtly or fairly dramatically, a change in the way we think.  

Speaker 1 Let me add another intellectual technology to the list there. Most  people like to point to the printing press as one of the most revolutionary  developments there. Where would you put it on the list?  

Nicholas Carr - I think it's right up there with the most important technologies 

that have shaped our intellectual lives, and what the what the printing press did  is it didn't invent the book. The book had been around in handwritten form for  centuries before Gutenberg invented the printing press, but the printing press  made the printed page the book and other forms of printed writing popular. And  as that happened, as more and more people sat down and read books, it in  effect, trained them to be more attentive thinkers. Because if you think about if  you think about the printed page, its great quality is that there's nothing else  going on. There's just the words proceeding, one after the other for long long, for long numbers of pages, long amounts of time. And what that does is it  encourages concentration and attentive thinking, paying attention to one story or one line of thought or one argument for long periods of time. And so to me, the  printing press is a great example of how a technology can change the way we  think, and in this case, make us more attentive, even more contemplative  thinkers.  

Speaker 1 And let me bring us now to present day, and by raising the issue of  the internet, that's doing the exact opposite of what you just pointed out, isn't it?  

Nicholas Carr - I think it is. I mean, if the if the printed pray, printed page filtered  out distractions, screened us from interruptions and encouraged attentive  thought, the internet, the the network connected, computer screen does exactly  the opposite. It bombards us with distractions. And that, you know, that's its  great quality as a technology. It's a multimedia system. It's great for exchanging  messages very quickly. It's great for alerting us to all sorts of information. But the downside of that is it keeps us pretty much in a perpetual state of distraction,  constant. Interruptions. And as as the internet has shrunk down to the size of  tablets and iPhones and blackberries, we tend to carry this technology with us  all day long. And what happens is we never get any encouragement or any  reward for concentrated thought, for paying attention to one thing without  interruption. And as a result, I think for all the benefits it gives us, and there are  a lot of benefits, obviously, to the net, I think it encourages in US and in society  as a whole, a more superficial way of thinking. All the stresses on getting as  much information as possible, and there's no stress on thinking deeply about  that information. Let's  

Speaker 1 get a little more scientific about that, and talk to us, if you would,  about what's actually happening either in our brains or to our brains when we're  reading a printed page, as opposed to a web page on a computer screen. Well,  

Nicholas Carr - one of the one of the mysteries about these intellectual or  cognitive effects of technologies is that, until fairly recently, we didn't know. We  didn't really have a cause. We didn't know why that was going on. But in the last 

few decades, neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that our brains  are very adaptable at the cellular level, and that's not just when we're kids, as  used to be assumed, it's throughout our adult lives. In essence, our brains adapt to what we use them for, and they adapt to the technologies we use. And so the  ways of thinking that that we engage in a lot get strengthened, and those that  we don't engage in get weaker. So if you think about when you read a printed  page, the ways of thinking that are that in effect you're training yourself to do are the ways that require deep attention, close concentration on one thing in those  types of thinking, it turns out which which are hard to do. I think naturally we like  to be distracted, but those very attentive ways of thinking are have been  associated with the ability to create deep memories in our own minds, to create  the connections between information and experiences that give richness and  depth to our thought, to certain types of conceptual thinking and critical thinking  and even creative thinking. What you have with the net is, is this persist,  persistent state of interruptions that short circuits that deep, attentive thinking.  And now there are some good things about that you what you see in the  scientific evidence is that the more we use the web, the more we use  computers, we tend to strengthen certain visual skills, our ability to keep track of lots of images moving across a screen, but by short circuiting those more  attentive ways of thought, I think you also lose things like deep conceptual  thinking, or at least hamper it in deep critical thinking and even deep creative  thinking. So there's a cost to this constant inflow, this constant barrage of  information that we find ourselves processing more and more today. Let  

Speaker 1 me follow up on that a little bit, because I can, I can recall when I first  got into television, more than 25 years ago, I was always told if you're going to  do an interview with somebody, don't do it in front of a sign, because people will  try to read what's on the sign, and they won't listen to what the person is saying.  Nowadays, if you watch all news channels, they've got, you know, they've got  somebody talking on the screen, they've got the weather, they've got the traffic,  they've got, you know, a ticker tape going along the bottom. They've got the  sports scores from last night. They've got six different, seven different things up  there on that screen that you're able to pay attention to. And my question is, now that we live in an internet age, are we really able to take all that information and  multitask, if you like, with any degree of, you know, permanence is too strong a  word, but can we do it effectively?  

Nicholas Carr - Well, the short answer is no. There are lots of good things about multitasking, about being able to, you know, have a conversation when we're  cooking or something, but the science is pretty clear that actually, when we  multitask, what we're really doing is shifting our attention very, very quickly  among different things. So we're not doing two things simultaneously. We're 

doing different things. And as we switch our attention from one to the other very  quickly, we incur what, what brain scientists call switching costs, which is our  brains have to attune. Our brain has to attune itself to one thing, then clear that  thing out and attune itself to another thing. And as we do this, we become less  efficient thinkers, on the one hand, but we also have some very other we have  some other negative effects. The recent studies show that people who do a  whole lot of multitasking, they begin to lose their ability to distinguish important  information from trivia. What becomes important to them is simply getting new  information. It doesn't matter whether it's good information or bad, just that  experience of getting something new begins to be the overriding goal in their  intellectual lives. So we certainly wouldn't want to only be able to focus on one  thing at a time. But it's also important to realize that when we spend all our time  shifting our focus, multitasking, juggling lots of information, we do lose some  important qualities of thinking that require attention.  

Speaker 1 I guess this is the genius of these new sites like politico, which you  know, with breathless anticipation, we'll let you know who the newest assistant  Under Secretary for agricultural affairs in the Omaha offices. And you know,  people are grabbing their blackberries 30 times a day to get these kinds of  updates at the end of the day, this kind of stuff is not all that helpful, is it?  

Nicholas Carr - It often isn't in in what happens is all of these information feeds  are cumulative. So you're not only you know, monitor monitoring what, when,  what one website is giving you, you're also monitoring your Facebook page and  your friends updates and your Twitter stream and your text messages and your  email and as these things accumulate, you really have no time to be alone with  your thoughts and to think deeply about one thing. And there's even evidence  that just the simple act of getting a new little bit of information releases some  dopamine in our brains. And dopamine is a pleasure producing chemical, very  important brain chemical, but it's also associated with addictive behavior. And so you can kind of from that, you can kind of see why we're so we tend to be so  compulsive, even obsessive, and kind of gathering as much as many little bits of information as we can, all day long through our various devices.  

Speaker 1 David Brooks is a, I'm sure you know, a quite fine columnist with The  New York Times. And let me read an excerpt of something he wrote a few years  ago about this. He said, I had thought that the magic of the Information Age was  that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the Information  

Age was that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive  servants, silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer  preference algorithms and networked knowledge, we can burden these servants and liberate ourselves. What do you think of David Brooks's take on that? 

Nicholas Carr - Well, there's some truth to that. It's it's a good thing that we  have sources of information that lie outside of our own of our our own brain, and that we can call on very quickly. But there's a fundamental flaw in this argument  as well, and that's this idea, and it's becoming a common idea that, Oh, you  know, we don't have to, we don't have to remember anything anymore, because  we can just google it. We can just look out on the web. The problem with that is  that these external Websites and external databases are not the same as  human memory. What happens when we actually remember something is that  we connect that information with the other facts we know, with the experiences  we've had, with the emotions we felt. And it's those connections that only take  place inside our own memory, inside our own mind, that give richness and  distinctiveness to our thinking and even to our personality. I think so, when we  begin to rely on these external technologies as as ineffective replacement for  memory, we're actually kind of reducing the depth of our thought. And there's,  there's evidence that, you know, the more things we remember, the better our  learning is, the deeper our thinking is. So it's, you know, the mind isn't like a  refrigerator. If you if you take out a gallon of milk, you can fit in a pound of  hamburger or something. The processes of memory, of building memory are  actually really, really important for deep thinking. And the more we have in our  memory, the richer our thoughts become. You're  

Speaker 1 obviously coming from a position which suggests that this need for  solitary or deep thinking is intrinsically good for us. And I wonder whether you  know, there may be some people who are saying it ain't necessarily so you want to make the case for that.  

Nicholas Carr - It's true that, that there are people who say that, given the  speed of life today, in this, in the amount of information around us, maybe  contemplativeness and kind of, you know, quiet, attentive thinking, reflection,  introspection, maybe those things aren't important and, and I have to say, you  know, there, you can make that case at a very practical level that maybe, you  know, maybe that all doesn't matter, but it's important if you're going to, if you're  going to think in that way and you're going to make that case, it's important to  Understand that there that, given the way our minds work, there are forms, I  think, very important forms of thinking. And as I said, this is, this is, you know,  conceptual thought, critical thought, very creative ways of thinking that only  seem to happen when we shield ourselves from distraction. And pay deep  attention to one thing. So if we're going to abandon that, we're also going to lose some of these very important and very human ways of thinking, and maybe as a society, that's the choice we're going to make. But what I would encourage  everyone is to make sure that we actually want what we're going to get if we go 

in that direction,  

Speaker 1 in which case, in our last minute and a half here, do you want to give  us some practical advice on how we can avoid some of those negative  consequences you've just laid  

Nicholas Carr - out? Well, the easy part is giving the advice, and that is to not  be so reliant on our gadgets, and to give us give ourselves time away from that  constant influx of information. The hard thing, of course, as many of us have  found in our own lives, is actually doing that, because not only do we love this  flow of information, but there's increasing pressure on us to be constantly  connected in our work lives, in our social lives and so forth. So I think beyond  just exerting more personal discipline, you have to begin changing the signals  that schools and employers and governments and institutions give, and begin to  say, you know, it's okay to be disconnected. Sometimes it's okay to think deeply  and quietly sometimes. And until that happens, I think we're going to keep going  in the same direction we've been. Going tell  

Speaker 1 it to the boss. Nicholas, do you think the boss wants to hear that. I  think one  

Nicholas Carr - thing that surprised me since the book came out, as I've heard  from more and more companies saying they're getting nervous about employees inability to stay focused on one thing. So so we there is some sense that things  are changing now. Gotcha.  

Speaker 1 Nicholas Carr, from Denver, Colorado, it's so good of you to join us  on TVO tonight. Thanks so much. Thank you. 



Last modified: Tuesday, February 4, 2025, 1:44 PM