Not so shallow

Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows is the literary equivalent of Marmite. You will either love it or you will hate it. It's like many books that have recently critiqued the Internet Age. Similarly to Brabazon's Digital Hemlock or Keen's Cult of the Amateur - The Shallows takes a controversial stance. It has one message - the Internet is dumbing down society by trivialising knowledge. Carr's book develops this argument a little further by arguing that the things we do on the Internet have a physical effect on our brains. And yet this is not a new idea - it was proposed earlier during the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan who suggested that after we shape our tools, our tools shape us. Arguably, this notion was itself borrowed from Sir Winston Churchill who had earlier argued that we design our buildings and then our building in turn dictate our behaviour once we are contained within them.

Carr's book gained traction because the time was ripe for its publication. There were already many criticisms of how users simply Googled something when they needed to know something. Web searches could only go so far to provide knowledge, and that knowledge might be superficial anyway, especially if it had been generated by amateurs on a site such as Wikipedia. The web sceptics needed to gain some purchase around this kind of argument, and Carr provided it in a timely manner - in the form of a paperback that eloquently argued these points on their behalf - the Internet is not as good as it's cracked up to be. But five years on from the publication of The Shallows, we now need to ask - was he right?

Consider this excerpt: The Net grants us instant access to a library of information unprecedented in its size and scope, and it makes it easy for us to sort through that library - to find, if not exactly what we were looking for, at least something sufficient for our immediate purposes. What the Net diminishes is Johnson's primary kind of knowledge: the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give rise to a singular intelligence (Carr, 2010, p 143).

Disregarding the rather twee reference to 'the Net', we can see the essence of Carr's argument in a nutshell. His reference to Samuel Johnson's 'two kinds of knowledge' - the explicit and tacit - is earlier explained, as actually 'knowing' a subject, or merely knowing where to find it. The first, in cognitive terms is declarative (knowing that), and the second is procedural (knowing how). Carr implies that the former is more desirable the latter, because knowing something is superior to knowing where to find that knowledge prior to knowing it. It can be conceded that in the pre-Internet knowledge economy, this set of values would have been agreed by most and it persists today in formal education. But we now live in an information rich world where knowledge is distributed, mutable and negotiated. The distinction between the two forms of knowledge assumes less importance, because tacit and implicit knowledge are equally vital, and tend to blur together anyway. This is indeed a principle of connectivist theory, which argues that through the use of technology, knowing where to find knowledge when one requires has equal potency to actually 'knowing'.

Furthermore, if we believe as Carr does, that our technology shapes the way we behave, and we allow it to do so, we abdicate a great deal of the responsibility we hold as human beings. If we believe our autonomy is undermined by our technology, then we should also accept that technology is undesirable. This is the key flaw in Carr's argument - that if technology is 'undermining and trivialising' knowledge, and adversely influencing the way the think, it is inherently bad for us. Clearly though, technology is like any other tool - it can be used for good or for bad, and can shape our behaviour if we allow it. As Richard Clark once argued, all technology is neutral, and merely a vehicle delivers the goods, just as the Internet is a system that delivers knowledge.

What we do with that knowledge once we own it, is up to each of us - and in reality we can and often do construct our own idiosyncratic versions of that knowledge to create our 'singular intelligences'. What's more, through the Web we can create, share, remix and repurpose our knowledge in a multitude of new ways that were impossible prior to the Internet age. Now that doesn't sound too shallow to me.

Reference
Carr, N. (2010) The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think read and remember. London: Atlantic Books.

Photo by Lars Lentz on Wikimedia Commons


Not so shallow by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.