Depth Matters: Nicholas Carr
By Tiffany Lee Brown
Originally published in PLAZM magazine Issue #30, 2011
Nicholas Carr’s writing shows how much “deep thinking” can do for a person’s abilities to contemplate and communicate. In his recent bestseller, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, he lays out in clear, flowing prose the historical, cultural, and neurological pathways leading from ancient humans’ natural state of Homer Simpson-like distractedness to the focused, deep-thinking abilities engendered by the advent of technologies like written language and books. (See also Techgnosis by Erik Davis, who is also interviewed here.) After the deep thinking phase? It would seem that, thanks again to technology, humans are descending into… Looky! Donuts! Uh, what were we talking about?
Carr is the author of The Big Switch and Does IT Matter?. His writing appears in the Guardian, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Times of London, the New Republic, the Financial Times, Die Zeit and other publications. His essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” has been collected in several anthologies. He sits on the steering board of the World Economic Forum’s cloud computing project and writes the blog Rough Type. Earlier in his career, he was executive editor of the Harvard Business Review.
Tiffany Lee Brown: Your article in the Wall Street Journal, “Does the Internet Make You Dumber?” (based on your book The Shallows) discussed research that’s proving that the web, intensive screen time, hyperlinking, and multitasking are detrimental to our brains. Many people found out about this by distractedly following a link from Facebook, where some surmised that these so-called deep-thinking skills may not be relevant to our evolving culture. Two questions: Are we really that deep to begin with (at least since the advent of television)? If so, why does that depth matter?
Nick Carr: It seems overwhelmingly strange to me that we’ve reached a point in human history when the value of intellectual depth has become debatable. That’s a weird sort of progress. But, yes, I believe that we are deep, if we’re willing to make the effort, if we’re willing to exert control over our attention and our thoughts rather than allowing our minds to be perpetually distracted by glittering ephemera. Depth matters because it enriches the self; any practical benefits beyond that are gravy.
TLB: While your book goes into more, errrr, depth on the subject, can you encapsulate for us what you find “deep”? Perhaps, yeah, we do have to question whether depth is important anymore and whose self gets enriched by the experience of cultivating depth. What if it’s an engaging, big, important thing to me and you, but not to my teenaged nephew? If it’s such a positive thing, why don’t people bother? Could the younger generation find something more fulfilling, perhaps a technology-enabled type of fragmented or shallow self-definition that works for them as deeper thinking has worked for previous generations?
NC: I’ve seen many people argue that there’s a sharp generational divide in the effects of the Net, but I don’t see any real evidence of that. I think the technology affects all of us in similar ways. I do, though, think that as a society we are in the midst of a long-term shift away from what Heidegger termed “meditative thinking” and toward “calculative thinking.” We are being encouraged to think in an ever more utilitarian fashion, with a focus on immediate problem-solving and well-defined, measurable results. The ideal of the solitary, contemplative thinker is steadily being devalued. This trend began long before the web appeared, but the web and related digital technologies seem to be accelerating it.
TLB: Many recent books and media that rip on or at least critique digital culture are written by folks who’ve been thinking and writing about this stuff for a long time. It occurs to me that our skepticism and worry might arise from the fact that we’ve simply been living in a networked reality longer than most people, so we have more experience with what happens when you get overinvolved with online communication for decades. And/or: we were part of an early migration to the digital frontier (remember that?) that was characterized by idealism. Now that some of our Internet dreams have been dashed, we’re wary of what’s replaced them. And/or: we’re turning into fretful old fogies. Your thoughts?
NC: In the months since The Shallows was published, I’ve heard from many, many people who share my concern that the Internet is sapping us of our ability to engage in attentive, contemplative forms of thinking. The correspondents include not only the middle-aged and the elderly, but teenagers, college students, twentysomethings, and other bright young things. So I’m not sure that age or experience matters that much. Indeed, if a popular rebellion against the cultural hegemony of the Net arises, I suspect it will be led by the young. Campuses will be the scenes of mass Facebook suicides. Virtual blood will run in the streets of Berkeley, New Haven, Ann Arbor, Portland. It doesn’t seem so far-fetched, does it?
TLB: It doesn’t! It’s good to hear that the responses range across ages. Maybe older people have books published about these phenomena simply because older people are more likely to be considered experts and therefore get nonfiction books published.
Moving on… my own experience is that long, uninterrupted stretches of being-in-time bring us face-to-face with our inner desires, allow us to connect with nature, engender richer interactions with each other, and definitely take artwork to another level. Given how hard it is to get away from pervasive technologies even when we want to, given the habitual and addictive nature of our constant state of connection, do you have concrete advice about how to unplug?
NC: It’s difficult, even for those of us who recognize the need for calmer, less interrupted thought. The problem is that our social norms and expectations are being reshaped around the Net. If in your job, your colleagues and boss are always connected, exchanging messages, it becomes hard to disconnect because you know your status at work may suffer. Similarly, if your friends are arranging their social lives through Facebook, texting, and Twitter, the price of disconnection can be a sense of social isolation. So at this point, disconnecting, even for relatively short spells, usually requires real sacrifices, which few people are willing to make.
TLB: Some people believe that transhuman and posthuman qualities are already part of us. What are your thoughts on trans- and post-humanist movements?
NC: When I think about such movements, I recall something that the philosopher Günther Anders said in the last century: “Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made.” This shame, which is really a form of misanthropy, underpins the enthusiasm of transhumanists and others who can’t wait for people to be turned into technology. Personally, I’m still more of a fan of humanism than transhumanism.
TLB: Some research on multitasking — not only screen-based multitasking — shows that when you do many things at once, or in distracted quick succession, you do them all poorly and inefficiently, regardless of your gender. But some research indicates that using parallel processing to, say, perform one brain-intensive task and one mindless task, can work well. Women are credited by psychologists and others with having evolved to multitask: if you can’t multitask, there is absolutely no way you can be the primary caretaker to young children, unless you’re rich and can buy help. Should this give women an advantage in a new, perhaps more fragmented world?
NC: I think that we humans, women and men alike, should be thankful for our skill at multitasking. Can you imagine how dull life would be if we lacked the ability to rapidly shift our focus from one task or topic to another? We wouldn’t be able to listen to the radio while driving, have conversations while cooking, juggle assignments at work, or even chew gum while walking. Our lives would grind to a depressing halt.
The ability to multitask is one of the essential strengths of our amazing brains. We wouldn’t want to lose it. But as neurobiologists and psychologists have shown, we pay a price when we multitask. Because the depth of our attention governs the depth of our thought and our memory, when we multitask we sacrifice understanding and learning. We do more but know less. And the more tasks we juggle and the more quickly we switch between them, the higher the cognitive price we pay.
The problem today is not that we multitask. We’ve always multitasked. The problem is that we never stop multitasking. The natural busy-ness of our lives is being amplified by the networked gadgets that constantly send us messages and updates, bombard us with other bits of important and trivial information, and generally interrupt the train of our thought. The data barrage never lets up. As a result, we devote ever less time to the calmer, more attentive modes of thinking that have always given richness to our intellectual lives and our culture — the modes of thinking that involve concentration, contemplation, reflection, introspection. The less we practice these habits of mind, the more we risk losing them altogether.
As to whether women are natively better than men at multitasking, I couldn’t say. It’s an intriguing theory, though.
