In 1964, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan published his opus Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In it he writes, “In the long run, a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.” Or, put more simply: “Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself.”
This idea that the media technologies we rely on reshape us on a fundamental, cognitive level sits at the center of Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. A world defined by oral traditions is more social, unstructured, and multisensory; a world defined by the written word is more individualistic, disciplined, and hypervisual. A world defined by texting, scrolling, and social feedback is addicted to stimulus, constantly forming and affirming expressions of identity, accustomed to waves of information.
Back in 2010, Carr argued that the internet was changing how we thought, and not necessarily for the better. “My brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting,” he wrote in The Shallows. “It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the same way the net fed it — and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became.” His book, a finalist for the Pulitzer that year, was dismissed by many, including me. Ten years on, I regret that dismissal. Reading it now, The Shallows is outrageously prescient, offering a framework and language for ideas and experiences I’ve been struggling to define for a decade.
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