Shallows

• Book: Nicholas Carr. The Shallows.

Discussion

David Weinberger:

"Cheap puns aside, my heart's with Shirky, although I liked Carr's The Shallows. It raises an important question, and pushes it hard. Further, when most people say that the Internet is making people stupid, they exempt themselves: it's those other people -- the ones I disagree with -- who are being made stupid. Carr on the other hand applies the critique to himself. He says he wants his old brain back.

Another reason I like The Shallows: It provides a rare and clear example of actual technodeterminism, a charge usually leveled against Shirky and his ilk. (I pride myself in being ilked with Shirky.) Technodeterminism is the claim that technology by itself has predictable, determinant effects on people or culture. Usually, in my opinion, the charge is a strawman argument, for the Shirky Ilk doesn't think that the effect of technology is independent of the factors that shape social and cultural reactions. Differences in culture, class, education, psychology, and personal history all affect how someone reacts to any technology. Of course. But with that limitation strongly in mind, we still need to be able to discuss how a technology is affecting a culture in general. Generalizations can be a vehicle of truth, so long as they are understood to be only generally true.

If I didn't believe that, I couldn't have written Too Big to Know, for it is about the effect of the Internet on knowledge. I'm careful to scope it only to traditional Western knowledge, and avoiding technodeterminism is a topic within the book itself. But, there is a seeming irony -- or, worse, a self-contradiction -- in my railing against knowledge as a reduction of the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world in a book that, for example, tries to give a "history of facts" in one brief chapter. But it's only an irony if you think I'm condemning any form of general statement. I'm not. Knowledge will always find patterns that apply across particulars. (The equating of knowledge with universals is a different matter.) In fact, I'm Hegelian about this: The new knowledge continues to find generalities that connect individual instances, but because the new ecosystem is hyperlinked, we can go from the generalities back to the individual cases. And those generalizations are themselves linked into a system of difference and disagreement.

In any case, Carr's book is admirably, straightforwardly technodeterminist: mere interaction with the Internet rewires our brains and diminishes our capacity for important forms of thought. Carr may be right, he may be wrong, he may have his values right or inside out, but he in any case at last gives the anti-technodeterminists a target that is not made out of straw. As a Shirky Ilkist, I enjoy that the clearest target for the anti-technodeterminists is a pessimist about the Net, rather than the Shirkian optimists who otherwise are so often the targets of their ilk." (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/what-the-internet-means-for-how-we-think-about-the-world/250934/)