Latest news with #NicholasCarr
Observer
14-05-2025
- General
- Observer
How has the Internet changed our minds?
History teaches us that the advent of the printing press sparked Europe's Enlightenment, while the Ottoman Empire hesitated to embrace it for fear of the upheaval it might bring to established patterns of knowledge and thought. That reluctance contributed to Western ascendancy, laying the groundwork for the intellectual and then industrial revolutions, and it marked the beginning of Ottoman, and by extension Islamic-civilisational stagnation. A similar inflection point occurred at the close of the twentieth century when the Internet emerged from its military and private confines into the wider human sphere. It has since effected an unprecedented shift in global consciousness, quietly penetrating our minds before its influence became undeniable in every aspect of our cognition, memory, reading habits and sense of time. In the 1960s, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan presciently declared that 'the medium is the message,' suggesting that each new technology not only reflects civilisational progress, but also actively reshapes our perception of the world. At the time, few imagined that the Internet, perhaps the most pervasive medium in history, would impose upon us a new, rapid, yet often superficial mode of knowing, dominated by images and deprived of complex meaning and sustained engagement. It has converted our brains into biological systems that forsake many traditional mental skills, such as deep memorisation, logical reasoning and analytical thought, in favour of instantaneous gratification. Neuroscience reveals that our brains possess 'neuroplasticity', the capacity to reconfigure neural networks in response to experience. Constant interaction with the Internet - its speed, interactivity and continual stimulus - becomes a repeated neural experience that slowly but inexorably reprogrammes our minds. Over time, we find ourselves unable to tolerate complexity or lengthy texts, craving fragmentation, summaries and immediate satisfaction. This marks a perilous transformation: we lose the depth of understanding, reflection, emotional engagement and intellectual stamina that once sustained us. Reading, no longer a profound cognitive practice, has become a shallow browsing, our eyes flitting from headline to hyperlink without lingering over meaning. We develop what might be called a 'screen mind", incapable of the abstraction and slow accumulation of knowledge afforded by the printed page. Online reading resembles fast food: momentarily filling but offering no real nourishment. Our memory suffers as well. As the American thinker Nicholas Carr argues in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, we have replaced internal recall with external retrieval. Search engines such as Google serve as extensions of our memory: we no longer retain information, only its location. This fundamental shift, from an inwardly housed knowledge to one reliant on external mediators, erodes deep memory and reduces intelligence to a precarious immediacy based on access rather than understanding. The Internet's acceleration of temporal experience is equally profound. Where once we measured time by its unfolding, the gradual sediment of lived experience, we now quantify it in notifications, updates and fleeting interactions. Emotions - joy, sorrow - have become transient states, compressed into emoticons and quickly superseded by the next digital wave. This relentless pace weakens our experiential memory, leaving us momentary beings adrift from authentic existential belonging, with neither a genuine past nor a reflective horizon of the future. Thirty years after the Internet's dawn, as we enter an even more expansive digital era shaped by artificial intelligence, we must ask: is this 'liberation from time' or a detachment from meaning? Does the proliferation of knowledge sources truly make us wiser, or have we lost the equilibrium between intellectual accumulation and digital dispersion? The contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han speaks of 'digital burnout', whereby information overload and the absence of patience yield a fragmented self in perpetual pursuit of gratification rather than comprehension. Yet we cannot deny the Internet's immense promise: access to digital libraries, online courses and global lectures have forged new pathways of knowledge. The challenge does not lie in the tool itself but in our undisciplined digital habits and our inclination towards the easiest, quickest stimuli. What we need is a reclamation of cognitive sovereignty: training ourselves in intellectual patience, slow contemplation, extended reading and rigorous analysis instead of perfunctory scrolling. Our brains, built as they are from neurons, are equally shaped by habits of mind. If algorithms have transformed our thinking, we possess the will, awareness and deliberate choice to remould those algorithms ourselves. The true battle of our age is not against the Internet, but against the mental distortions born of its hasty use. The Internet remains one of humanity's most powerful technical achievements, capable of reshaping human consciousness for the better, so long as we remain vigilant against the lure of speed and superficiality. Dr Muamar bin Ali Al Tobi The writer is an academic and researcher
Time of India
02-05-2025
- General
- Time of India
When the real can't compete
On humanity's surrender to #Virtuality Think of the Bible's opening verse, 'God said let there be light and there was light.' The original act of creation here is communication. Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr is not just about how modern communication has failed us. It's also a reminder that it's with words we bring ourselves into being and also our world. When words began to be translated into codes and human messengers got replaced by mechanical ones, efficiency gains in communication were widely viewed with a sentimental lens. Tellingly, the 1865 International Telegraph Conference called itself 'a veritable Peace Congress'. In the decades to come, radio and telephone acolytes similarly thought these new technologies would bring nations together and end war. That WW I onwards the 20th century would be the bloodiest one ever proved, the book says, that we had been telling ourselves lies about communication – and about ourselves. Still, with the internet, the smartphone, social media, LLMs, again and again the peace fallacy, as much as the 'democratisation' one, would resurface. But think back to the email exchanges in the 1998 romantic comedy You've Got Mail – those were expansive, intimate and heartfelt. There was a continuity with the way letters, once upon a time, sustained and deepened relationships. John Donne said, 'More than kisses, letters mingle souls.' Then our inboxes got overwhelmed. IMs and textspeak happened. In 2006 Facebook introduced News Feed, which replaced personal agency in seeking info about each other with machine agency. We barely flinched. In 2004 when Google introduced Gmail service, this new mailman announced he would read all our mail and use this data however he wished. We said, cool. By now we've surrendered so much agency that 'digital personal assistants' are less gofer, more doppelganger. Except, they super multiply our 'connections' even as social media blurs conversation and broadcasting. What the book explains is the tragedy of communication, where too much of it begins to undermine the very social and personal qualities we look to it to foster. A half century ago, Baudrillard coined the term 'hyperreality' to describe an existence governed less by reality than by code and simulation. The poppy superbloom from which the book takes its name was a 2019 LA flowering that millions of social media feeds turned into frenzied, farcical mob-like mass mimicry. As if the superbloom never happened and only #superbloom did. The more rapid and shallow our processing of information becomes, the more we depend on stereotypes, which we then retweet, like, share, rebroadcast and amplify. Repetition also becomes a proxy for facticity. This illusory truth effect is what 'put power into the hands of the people' sentimentalists did not anticipate. What increases engagement is good business for the tech companies. But don't just blame the algorithmically generated echo chambers and filter bubbles. Research shows that even a more balanced info diet can stimulate greater partisanship. Because people experience information from outside their echo chamber as an attack on their identity. Because opinions emerge from affiliation, not vice versa. They're a byproduct of tribal allegiance. Group identity is rooted in emotion, not reason, the book says. How can the real world compete against the programmed delights of the virtual? How can we resist immaterialism? Let's begin with a walk or penning a letter. Without the smartphone. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Nicholas Carr: Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. 'Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain,' Nicholas Carr wrote in 2008, 'remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going—so far as I can tell—but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think.' Carr's cover story for The Atlantic, 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?,' helped crystallize a sense of unease that had just started to dampen widespread enthusiasm for online life and its possibilities. New means of communication and knowledge transmission—the printing press, radio, television, now the internet—have always been met with fears about what may be lost with their adoption. Although these concerns can be overblown, they are not unfounded. Because communication technologies mediate our understanding of other humans and the outside world, changes in those technologies really do affect the way we think—sometimes profoundly. Carr's cover story was the first in a long line of explorations in The Atlantic about the unintended consequences of online life on our minds and behaviors. (Our February cover story, 'The Anti-Social Century,' by Derek Thompson, is one of the latest installments.) Recently, I spoke with Carr about his essay, and about how the digital world continues to change the way we read, think, and remember. This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity. The Honeymoon Is Over Don Peck: In 2008, before iPhones were widely used, before social media was ubiquitous, you made the argument that the internet was changing our brains, chipping away at our ability to think deeply. The tech environment then was in many ways very different from the one we live in today. How has that argument aged? Nicholas Carr: When I wrote the article, I saw it as a personal essay built on my own sense that I was losing my ability to concentrate because I was spending so much time online. And I knew I was being speculative. Unfortunately, I think my speculations have been proved correct. Look at how technology has changed since 2008: As you said, the iPhone had just come out. Social media was mainly used by kids. The kind of distractions and interruptions that I described—which back in 2008 kind of only happened when you were sitting in front of your laptop or desktop—now happen all the time. So I think that, if anything, disruptions to our train of thought and our ability to put information into context and to interpret things deeply—it's now much worse than it was 17 years ago. Peck: What have you done in your own life, since then, to resist the problems of scatter and superficiality? And has any of it worked? Carr: I wish I could say I've solved the problem. When I wrote the article, we were still in a honeymoon phase with the internet, and most people assumed that by getting greater access to information, you'd make people smarter. But I think we all struggle today, because society has reshaped itself around the assumption that everybody is online all the time. It's very hard to break free of that. Social media is particularly good at distracting us, so I try to keep my presence there to a minimum. I try not to keep my phone on my person all the time: If I'm going out for a walk or going out to dinner, I'll try to leave it behind. If your phone's always with you, it grabs a permanent hold on your attention—even if you're not looking at it, you're thinking of looking at it because you know something new is always there. But I don't want to present myself as some model of a person who's solved this problem. And I have to say, I think the struggle is getting harder rather than easier, even though we kind of see the problem more clearly now. Peck: You have a new book out, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. It follows, to some extent, from some of the inquiries you began all those years ago. What's the main message of the book? Carr: So, ever since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, we've taken an idealistic view of communication. We believe that if communication among people is generally good, then more communication is going to be better. It's going to bring more understanding and ultimately more social harmony. In the book, I argue that that assumption is catastrophically wrong. When you speed up the exchange of messages and information beyond a certain point, you actually overwhelm the mind's ability to make sense of it all in a deep way. To keep up with the flow, people have to sacrifice emotional and intellectual depth. We become reactive and impulsive, and that ends up triggering misunderstanding and animosity and, in general, misanthropy. The book looks at how the internet affects our social lives—the way we converse, the way we develop relationships, the way we socialize in general—from a perspective that is kind of similar to the way that my 2008 cover story looked at our intellectual lives. In both, what I'm arguing is that there's a fundamental conflict between how the technology works and how our minds work. And it's a conflict that I'm not sure can be remedied. Peck: Some of the changes involve not just the way we read or receive information, but also the way we write and post. Can you talk about how that affects our thinking as well? Carr: In the 1980s and early 1990s, as email was becoming popular, I think most people initially saw it as a substitute for the postal system. And people wrote long, careful emails, in a very similar form to what they would have written in a personal letter. But as the intensity of email picked up, they became shorter, sloppier, and more superficial. And yet they displaced letters—very few people write personal letters anymore. The flow of messages through social media and texting intensified all that, and telegraphic exchanges have become the default language we use today. In one sense, you can understand that. We've adopted this new way of speaking to one another because it's the only way to stay afloat in the flood of messages we have to deal with. But self-creation comes through language, through expressing yourself. By constantly compressing the way we speak, we've lost a lot of nuance, and I think we've also compressed ourselves in a way. And we've let this all happen with very little resistance. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Nicholas Carr: Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic 's archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. 'Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain,' Nicholas Carr wrote in 2008, 'remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going—so far as I can tell—but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think.' Carr's cover story for The Atlantic, ' Is Google Making Us Stupid?,' helped crystallize a sense of unease that had just started to dampen widespread enthusiasm for online life and its possibilities. New means of communication and knowledge transmission—the printing press, radio, television, now the internet—have always been met with fears about what may be lost with their adoption. Although these concerns can be overblown, they are not unfounded. Because communication technologies mediate our understanding of other humans and the outside world, changes in those technologies really do affect the way we think—sometimes profoundly. Carr's cover story was the first in a long line of explorations in The Atlantic about the unintended consequences of online life on our minds and behaviors. (Our February cover story, ' The Anti-Social Century,' by Derek Thompson, is one of the latest installments.) Recently, I spoke with Carr about his essay, and about how the digital world continues to change the way we read, think, and remember. This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity. The Honeymoon Is Over Don Peck: In 2008, before iPhones were widely used, before social media was ubiquitous, you made the argument that the internet was changing our brains, chipping away at our ability to think deeply. The tech environment then was in many ways very different from the one we live in today. How has that argument aged? Nicholas Carr: When I wrote the article, I saw it as a personal essay built on my own sense that I was losing my ability to concentrate because I was spending so much time online. And I knew I was being speculative. Unfortunately, I think my speculations have been proved correct. Look at how technology has changed since 2008: As you said, the iPhone had just come out. Social media was mainly used by kids. The kind of distractions and interruptions that I described—which back in 2008 kind of only happened when you were sitting in front of your laptop or desktop—now happen all the time. So I think that, if anything, disruptions to our train of thought and our ability to put information into context and to interpret things deeply—it's now much worse than it was 17 years ago. Peck: What have you done in your own life, since then, to resist the problems of scatter and superficiality? And has any of it worked? Carr: I wish I could say I've solved the problem. When I wrote the article, we were still in a honeymoon phase with the internet, and most people assumed that by getting greater access to information, you'd make people smarter. But I think we all struggle today, because society has reshaped itself around the assumption that everybody is online all the time. It's very hard to break free of that. Social media is particularly good at distracting us, so I try to keep my presence there to a minimum. I try not to keep my phone on my person all the time: If I'm going out for a walk or going out to dinner, I'll try to leave it behind. If your phone's always with you, it grabs a permanent hold on your attention—even if you're not looking at it, you're thinking of looking at it because you know something new is always there. But I don't want to present myself as some model of a person who's solved this problem. And I have to say, I think the struggle is getting harder rather than easier, even though we kind of see the problem more clearly now. Peck: You have a new book out, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. It follows, to some extent, from some of the inquiries you began all those years ago. What's the main message of the book? Carr: So, ever since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, we've taken an idealistic view of communication. We believe that if communication among people is generally good, then more communication is going to be better. It's going to bring more understanding and ultimately more social harmony. In the book, I argue that that assumption is catastrophically wrong. When you speed up the exchange of messages and information beyond a certain point, you actually overwhelm the mind's ability to make sense of it all in a deep way. To keep up with the flow, people have to sacrifice emotional and intellectual depth. We become reactive and impulsive, and that ends up triggering misunderstanding and animosity and, in general, misanthropy. The book looks at how the internet affects our social lives—the way we converse, the way we develop relationships, the way we socialize in general—from a perspective that is kind of similar to the way that my 2008 cover story looked at our intellectual lives. In both, what I'm arguing is that there's a fundamental conflict between how the technology works and how our minds work. And it's a conflict that I'm not sure can be remedied. Peck: Some of the changes involve not just the way we read or receive information, but also the way we write and post. Can you talk about how that affects our thinking as well? Carr: In the 1980s and early 1990s, as email was becoming popular, I think most people initially saw it as a substitute for the postal system. And people wrote long, careful emails, in a very similar form to what they would have written in a personal letter. But as the intensity of email picked up, they became shorter, sloppier, and more superficial. And yet they displaced letters—very few people write personal letters anymore. The flow of messages through social media and texting intensified all that, and telegraphic exchanges have become the default language we use today. In one sense, you can understand that. We've adopted this new way of speaking to one another because it's the only way to stay afloat in the flood of messages we have to deal with. But self-creation comes through language, through expressing yourself. By constantly compressing the way we speak, we've lost a lot of nuance, and I think we've also compressed ourselves in a way. And we've let this all happen with very little resistance.
New York Times
29-01-2025
- General
- New York Times
How Big Tech Mined Our Attention and Broke Our Politics
On April 15, 1912, shortly after the Titanic collided with an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, the ship's radio operator issued a distress call — a formidable display of the power of the radio, a new technology. But a lack of regulation in the United States meant that a cascade of amateur radio messages clogged the airwaves with speculation and rumors, and official transmissions had a hard time getting through. It was an early-20th-century form of information overload. 'The false reports sowed confusion among would-be rescuers,' Nicholas Carr writes in 'Superbloom.' 'Fifteen hundred people died.' Carr has been sounding the alarm over new information technology for years, most famously in 'The Shallows' (2010), in which he warned about what the internet was doing to our brains. 'Superbloom' is an extension of his jeremiad into the social media era. Carr's new book happens to be published the same day as 'The Sirens' Call,' by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, which traces how big tech has made enormous profits and transformed our politics by harvesting our attention. Both authors argue that something fundamental to us, as humans, is being exploited for inhuman ends. We are primed to seek out new information; yet our relentless curiosity makes us ill equipped for the infinite scroll of the information age, which we indulge in to our detriment. 'Social media is not successful because it goes against our instincts and desires,' Carr writes. 'It's successful because it gives us what we want.' He lays some of the blame with tech companies, which ply us with the digital equivalent of junk food. They engineer how we relate to one another online by selecting for content that whips up strong emotions to draw us 'deeper into the feed.' But Carr also suggests that regulation can only do so much: Blaming the technology industry lets us off the hook. This is a book that gestures repeatedly to a tragic, if nebulous, concept of 'human nature.' More communication does not necessarily lead to more understanding. The title refers to a rare 'super bloom' of California poppies in typically arid soil, an episode that drew selfie-taking influencers, flower-trampling crowds and a frenzied backlash. Left to our own devices, so to speak, we can get vain, careless, resentful and cruel. There's an unmistakable skepticism of progress in this book, at least when it comes to modern communication technology. Our antisocial proclivities were once kept in check by more effortful methods of reaching out to one another. 'The deliberate, reflective practice' of composing a handwritten letter, Carr laments, has been superseded by the 'short, snappy' idiom of texting. By removing barriers to communication, social media has enabled us to let loose our worst instincts and transmit to a huge audience whatever thoughtlet comes to mind. (Mostly avoiding the subject of Donald Trump, he glancingly mentions 'the election to the presidency of the United States of a malevolent coxcomb with a tweeting habit.') Abundance, in this case, stokes conflict. 'Different points of view are seen not as opportunities to learn but as provocations to attack.' Instead of the curation imposed by 'the public-interest standard' and 'the fairness doctrine,' a deteriorating media ecosystem selects for clicks. Consider Mark Zuckerberg's explanation of Facebook's bespoke News Feed: 'A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.' The grotesque comparison was an early salvo in our informational war of all against all. 'News, entertainment, conversation and all other forms of human expression would from now on be in direct competition,' Carr writes, 'angling for both the consumer's fleeting attention and the algorithm's blessing.' It's a phenomenon that Hayes, as a TV news anchor, knows all too well. 'The Sirens' Call' is mostly about the social and political deformations wrought by the new attention economy. But Hayes has also been parsing the predicament of attention for a long time. 'Every waking moment of my work life revolves around answering the question of how we capture attention,' he writes in the book's early pages. And the marketplace has been getting ever more ruthless. 'Increasingly over the course of time I've been on air, my competition isn't just what other cable news shows are on during that time, but literally every single piece of content available in any media: every movie ever made, every TV show ever made, every video on TikTok or Instagram, every app and video game available.' Of course, it's not as if there's been a dearth of attention paid to the subject of attention. Books like Tim Wu's 'The Attention Merchants' and Shoshana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' have traced how our attention has been measured and monetized — sliced and diced into salable packets so that it's now commodified like never before. A raft of memoirs and self-help books have explored what those markets have done to our individual psyches. What Hayes offers in 'The Sirens' Call' is an ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics. Where Carr's tone is elegiac and mournful, Hayes's is more pragmatic. He makes ample use of social science studies that parse how human attention works. We get overstimulated when bombarded by stimuli, but we become restless when left alone with our thoughts. Our phones — 'little slot machines we hold in our pocket' — pull us in both directions, providing us with a simulation of sociability while exacerbating our loneliness, and capture our attention on the cheap. Book publishers and Hollywood producers may have always been preoccupied with the question of how to sustain an audience's attention, but social media entrepreneurs don't have to bother with anything so mysterious (and expensive): 'They can simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention and then repeat those.' It turns out that a reliable way of grabbing people's attention is to ping that deep need inside all of us, carried over from our helpless dependency on our caregivers in childhood: Someone is paying attention to me! We typically crave positive forms of attention and shrink back from negative ones — except for people like Trump, whose 'psychological needs' are 'so bottomless,' Hayes says, 'that he'll take attention in whatever form he can get.' Trump has intuited that we live at a time when fortune favors the brazen: 'He'll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you're thinking about him.' Attention isn't a resource like coal or oil, which exist outside us; attention is what makes us human, Hayes maintains, and this particular stage of capitalism is fueled by a fracking of our minds. It's not as if Trump is keen to regulate any extraction industry, let alone the one that helped bring him to the White House. So it isn't surprising that both 'The Sirens' Call' and 'Superbloom' end by emphasizing the need for each of us to reintroduce the friction of the physical world into our informational lives. Instead of submitting to the endless scroll, Hayes now makes a point of sitting down with a print version of the newspaper. Carr, for his part, extols a 'more material and less virtual existence.' I think they're both right, even if trying to change one's own behavior feels small next to the structural forces delineated in their books. But for now, yes — it's going to take willful acts of sensory deprivation for us to come to our senses.
