The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr

Can you concentrate as well as you did five years ago? It may not be your age/pregnancy/chemo brain after all. Carr believes the Internet and our multiple devices for accessing its riches have changed more than how much we know and how much we can retrieve. He believes, like Marshall McLuhan back in the 70s, that the medium we use changes the way we think.

The book changed the transfer of knowledge from an aural to a visual process. Enjoyment of a story also became a solitary, rather than a group, experience. Carr argues that computers in all their permutations have changed the way our brains process input. Books require contemplative, linear thought – hours of reading from left to right and top to bottom. Television and radio allowed new kinds of content, but still required going from the beginning to the end, at least until the remote channel surfing culture emerged from the explosive growth of channels available. The computer allows us to link from page to page on phrases, reading/watching bits here and there, moving haphazardly around the screen gathering what we deem the most pertinent or interesting content.
Carr’s thesis is simple. If this is the only way we use our brains, eventually this is the way our brain begins to function. Contemplation as a thought process becomes as atrophied as our appendix.

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