14: Shallow Reading, Shallow Thinking

Table of contents

1. Review
2. Nicholas Carr, the Shallows c. 6
   1. Lost Edges
   2. Possible Objection
   3. More concerns
   4. A Tension
3. Nicholas Carr, the Shallows c. 7
   1. Necessitating vs. Rewarding
   2. New Authorial Responsibilities?
   3. Carr’s Critique In Sum
   4. An Objection: Categories of Evaluation
   5. Carr on the additional Cognitive Burden of the Hyperlinked Text
   6. Another possible response
4. Birkerts: Against Hyperlinks

Review

To date, we have focused our attention on the pioneers of the digital or electronic text. These thinkers (Bush, Nelson, Landow) were at pains to point out many of the limitations (and even biases) of the the printed text.

Today, I’d like to turn the tables a bit and look at some of the popular critiques of the so-called benefits of the hyperlinked text.

One of the most vocal critiques of the digital (hyperlinked) text comes from author Nicholas Carr, who in 2008 wrote an article in the Atlantic called Is Google Making us Stupid. Carr soon expanded this article into a book called the Shallows, from which our reading selections for today are taken.

I would like to focus our class discussion around chapters 6 and 7. Below are my notes to help guide your thinking as you read.

Nicholas Carr, the Shallows c. 6

Lost Edges

In chapter 6, Carr turns his attention to the growing popularity of E-Readers and quotes a few people who are self-identified book lovers. He notes their attraction and enthusiasm for the kindle.

Question: For example, why does L. Gordon Crovitz like the Kindle and why does Carr think he his enthusiasm is ill-founded?

“Crovitz has fallen victim to blindness that McLuhan warned against; the inability to see how a change in a medium’s form is also a change in its content.” (p. 102)

But is this really the case? In the comparison to the kind of hypertext editions and potential for new hierarchies that we’ve been discussing, the switch to an e-reader still seems fairly “bookish” to me. It still seems fully embedded in the print-paradigm.

How does Carr see the shift even to an e-reader subtly affecting consciousness?

Consider pages 102-103. The problem seems to lie in its connectivity, its ability to connect to everything else and the immediate accessibility of everything else.

Possible Objection

I can see an objection here. Why can’t we just say, don’t follow the link. If you don’t want to be bothered by the hyperlink, stay where you are.

Perhaps this is a theoretical possibility, but if we believe Carr, empirical studies show that, on the whole, we can’t stop ourselves from following these links when we see them.

Thus, in sum, though it may not be NECESSARY that the digital medium destroys the “edges” of a text, it nevertheless remains true that, in practice, the “edges” are fading.

More concerns

Carr goes further in chapter 6 to discuss how the electronic text not only is changing reading habits, but also writing habits.

Consider p. 105. How might distracted reading lead to changes in writing?

Consider p. 106. Judith Curr of Simon and Schuster says: “You can’t just be linear anymore with your text”.

This was seen as a positive by previous writer’s we have read. Why is it considered to be negative here?

Consider p. 107. What does Carr say about the “finality” and “permanence” of the printed book? How does he think this compares to digital medium? Why is this important?

Carr sees the content on the internet as constantly moving and changing. The dynamism praised by someone like Nelson seems, in Carr’s mind, to threaten the possibility of a fixed reference: “a fixed reference” which regards a necessary for deep thinking.

A Tension

NOTE: I’d like to note a tension here between the dominant use of a medium and the possibilities of the medium.

One the one hand, it is absolutely false (and uninformed) to say that we cannot create “immutable” digital objects. Consider the idea of “Content-Addressable Storage” as opposed to the system you and I are most familiar with which is built on “Location-Addressable Storage”.

On the other hand, it is true that the web at the present functions primarily through look ups on “mutable objects” or through “Location Addressability”.

But this doesn’t mean we won’t see in the future new developments that promote lookups of “immutable objects (via content-based lookups). For example, the new start up The interplanetary file system is trying to do just this.

The point is simply to say that the digital medium at the present does not enforce or demand the social practice that Carr critiques.

Nevertheless, the dominant social practice (at present) tends in the direction of his critique.

My question (as a scholar and web developer) is to what extent this means I need to be wary of the shift to the digital medium, or to what extent I need to be wary of the social inertial and market forces that determine how I use that medium.

Instead of rejecting the shift (as Carr seems to suggest), maybe my scholarly responsibility lies in contributing to social uses of that medium that are driven by scientific demands rather than market forces.

Nicholas Carr, the Shallows c. 7

Necessitating vs. Rewarding

The above mentioned tension between “forcing/necessitating” and “tending/rewarding” seems to be acknowledged by Carr in chapter 7.

The focus of this chapter shifts to an examination of early brain research on the effects of reading on the web.

On p. 116 (near the top) he admits that the web/internet reading doesn’t necessitate ‘cursory’ reading, but this is type of the reading that the TECHNOLOGY “encourages and rewards”.

Even here I want to be cautious. Is it the technology that “encourages” this or is it the social economy: namely, the Apps we have built that push us to exploit the potentials within the medium in certain ways rather than others.

To be sure, the digital technology opens up the possibility for new kinds of user-interfaces that have clearly been attractive to commercial interest, and these are the interfaces that tend to dominate our experience of the Internet. But they are by no means necessary or inevitable.

New Authorial Responsibilities?

I also wonder if, given the many different possibilities of the digital medium, there is a now a much greater responsibility on the author to be involved in the design of the reading interface: a responsibility that previous authors of merely printed texts never had to worry about.

I mean: if the printed book had natural limits, then I, as an author, could assume that the text I write would appear (or be presented) within the confines of a limited range of presentation possibilities. No matter what publisher I give the text to, I know that it will be presented on paper, in a static form, adhering to a standard visual encoding that all literary people can decipher.

But it is less clear that this is the case today.

Carr’s Critique In Sum

Perhaps none of this changes Carr’s central point.

We can offer multiple interfaces, but if social gravity tends toward multi-tasking interfaces, then the social effects he describes are still taking place, even if they are not strictly speaking necessary.

On p. 116-117, Carr says that if we set out to design a machine to re-wire the brain quickly and efficiently, we would have invented something like the Internet.

Why is the Internet so successfully and re-wiring the brain? He writes:

“the net also provides a high-speed system for delivering responses and rewards – “positive reinforcements,” in psychological terms – which encourage the repetition of both physical and mental actions….” (p.117)

“it also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment” (p. 117)

An Objection: Categories of Evaluation

I think we should step back from Carr’s critique and think once more about the categories of evaluation.

Unless we can identify some sort of eternal structures of good and bad by which we can evaluate the pros and cons of these changes to our brain, we have to admit that Carr’s ideas about positive and negative brain function are themselves determined by the medium which has dominated his life (namely the print medium).

If the goal/ideal is to consume information in the way we have during the reign of the printed book, then it is not hard to see the changes he describes as negative.

Similarly, if the goal was to be able to memorize vast sums of information (as it might be for Socrates), then one can easily see that the invention of writing is a negative development: an obstacle against the achievement of that goal.

But of course, even if Carr is correct and the digital medium means that we are losing certain cognitive abilities, we have to acknowledge that this same medium is also engendering new kinds of cognitive functions.

Carr certainly acknowledges that a “trading of skills” is taking place. See p. 121 where he says:

“We gain new skills and perspectives, but lose old ones”. (p. 121)

But I’m less convinced that he’s given me a rock-solid foundation to justify the valuing of one set of skills over another.

Consider the article by Sam Anderson “In Defense of Distraction” 2009, New York Magazine, cited by Carr on p. 140. This article points to some of the new mental advantages created by use of the Internet.

On p. 141 Patricia Greenfield is quoted as saying:

“every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others” (p. 141)

But in response to the above quotations, Carr writes:

“the Net is making us smarter, in other words, only if we define intelligence by the Net’s own standards.” (p. 141)

Carr on the additional Cognitive Burden of the Hyperlinked Text

According to p. 121-122, what different sets of skills, according to brain research, are being promoted by linear book reading and internet-surfing?

Answer: language, memory, visual processing vs. decision making and problem solving.

But Carr sees this facility with quick “decision making” as diametrically opposed to the goal of deep or concentrated thought.

I find this interesting an interesting point.

This suggests to me that even if I try to remain focused on reading an electronic page (that is, to refuse to follow hyperlinks, but instead remain focused on the linear text), if I know hyper-links are available, then I’m already necessarily involved in decision making tasks (decisions to not follow a link). And these tiny decisions made dozens of times per text are competing with my sentence or paragraph interpretation skills.

Thus, in addition to “losing edges”, the mere presence of a hyperlink and our decision to ignore it is considered by Carr to be an additional cognitive burden that makes “deep reading” more difficult.

In Chapter 7, p. 122 he writes:

But the extensive activity in the brains of surfers also points to why deep reading and other acts of sustained concentration become so difficult online. The need to evaluate links and make related navigational choices, while also processing a multiplicity of fleeting sensory stimuli, requires constant mental coordination and decision making, distracting the brain from the work of interpreting text or other information.

Again he writes:

“Hyperlinks as a direct example of contributing to cognitive overload. Studies show less retention when reading a document with hyperlinks.” p. 126-127.

Another possible response

Once more I would make a distinction here.

Hyperlinks, as discussed here, are a presentation and user experience decision.

It is also possible to create data in a way that preserves data connections and then use these links to create new texts or new text hierarchies.

But then it is completely possible to view these “dynamically constructed texts” in print or in an interface without distracting hyperlinks visually presented on the page.

In other words, I don’t think Carr’s critique fully appreciates this critical distinction between structured data and the presentation of that data.

But this brings us back to the discussion of who has responsibility for the “text presentation”, and the difference between practice ad theory.

We must admit that, while it is possible to give the user the option to hide hyperlinks, in practice most web interfaces do not provide us with this possibility.

Birkerts: Against Hyperlinks