My initial reaction to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains was something like “Pfft, yeah right, as if the Internet is making us stupider and less attent…hey look! A video of a boys choir singing like cats hahaha!” However, I did come to this book as both as a reader – that is someone who can sit down for hours with a book without distraction – and as someone who has grown up with the Internet. Concerned over his increasing inability to concentrate on reading, Nicholas Carr sets out to investigate how the Internet and widespread use of digital technologies is changing how we read, the ways we pay attention and changing the very structure of our brains.

The Shallows is set up with a brief introduction to the concept of neuroplasticity, that the brain is constantly changing and adapting to new circumstances, both positive and negative. Good and bad habitual behaviour changes the way our brains work, strengthening our bond with, or reinforcing, that behaviour. Carr shows us how the research on the topic has gradually been accepted, challenging as it was to the deeply held notion that the brain is stable, completely set in its ways past a certain age. This section delves into the scientific research that led to these conclusions, but never alienates the non-scientific reader with jargon and technicalities.

From there Carr looks at how technologies in the past have shaped the way we think and act, from maps and clocks changing perceptions and understanding of space and time, to the formation of the alphabet and the onset of cultural privileging of literacy over oral culture. These “intellectual technologies” had far reaching effects on us beyond their original intentions. This history lesson did feel like a rehash from Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, but it worked as a reminder of the evolution of the written word on the brain.

The bond between book reader and book writer has always been a tightly symbiotic one, a means of intellectual and artistic cross-fertilization. The words of the writer act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies. And the very existence of the attentive, critical reader provides the spur for the writer’s work. It gives the author the confidence to explore new forms of expression, to blaze difficult and demanding paths of thought, to venture into uncharted and sometimes hazardous territory. “All great men have written proudly, not cared to explain,” said Emerson. “They knew that the intelligent reader would come at last, and would thank them.”

The Internet, Carr argues, remains a literate culture, but profoundly different from the printed page. It combines all previous media streams – sound, film, images, print – whereas previously they had all developed separately. This multitextual medium has seen a change in our attention, immersion and experience of media. Digital media, not just the Internet but that is Carr’s primary focus here, is not conducive to deep thinking and cohesive understanding, and it is effecting our perception of human memory. Metaphors of the brain as a computer have misled our understanding of our memory itself, memory is alive, computer mechanics are not. Memory involves new synaptic growth, it is a continuing process that is reinforced through repetition. Carr presents the arguments of those that champion the technology – the “computers free up our memory and allow us to concentrate on more human things” argument – and then carefully sets up an argument that entirely refutes these claims with specific neurological and psychological studies.

The central argument is that we are becoming more intelligent, more adept in the ways the internet demands of us, but in different ways. Scanning, skimming, browsing and multitasking are becoming the dominant modes of reading online and these methods don’t allow our brains to fully comprehend or to deeply consider what we read. New technologies come to define us but also see the weakening of the human tool it replaces or assists (and this is true of non-digital technology too) and the Internet is changing how we perceive and use memory, emotion and intelligence. I found a study on academic research citations rather interesting, it showed that more recent “Internet age” research has a narrower scope than other “paper based” research – that is that when search engines prioritize prevailing opinion, researchers generally only follow along those lines. While more information is thought to be available to us now, the ways we use it, and the tools we used to sort through it, may be damaging our understanding of that information.

Carr’s argument is a compelling one, but the ending of this book seems to come out of nowhere, and just as I was beginning to really connect with the ideas he puts forward. Though his reasoning and logic is convincing throughout, this conclusion, or lack thereof, was comparatively weak. Carr is not the internet-phobe luddite I was expecting, and he doesn’t suggest we stop using the medium absolutely, just that we seek to understand it and the changes it places on our neurological patterns. And yes, The Shallows has convinced me to take action, to get out of the cycle of checking email, checking Twitter, checking stats, checking Google reader and then starting all over again. To actually turn the computer off when I’ve checked everything, to step back from that idea of constant immersion. It may not make much of a difference, but it is the first step.