The Stack June 3, 2010, 5:00PM EST

'The Shallows': Is the Net Fostering Stupidity?

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While Carr believes the Internet is a revolutionary tool for finding information, he also suggests that it may be a dangerously powerful impetus to groupthink. As evidence, he suggests a study by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders & Stroke suggesting that multitasking makes people "more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought." And a University of Chicago study showed that academic papers began citing fewer sources, not more, after publications began going online.

Taken to its extreme, Carr's arguments suggest the Internet Age is less likely than previous eras to produce Einsteins, Edisons, and Tolstoys. Such extraordinary people were not forever distracted from their work by 140-character bursts or incessant YouTube videos. Nor were they tempted to throw their semi-finished work out on the Web, safe in the knowledge that they could easily update it later. Indeed, Carr argues, they owe their mastery, in part, to the difficulty of achieving it. Absorbing entire hard-to-find texts—rather than forever Googling random facts—may have been a key to their development.

Even though the book is only now hitting shelves, many Internet devotees will undoubtedly take its thesis as pure quackery. Presented with Carr's arguments, Theodore Gray, co-founder of search engine provider Wolfram Research, told me: "It's very easy to look back and point to Voltaire and Einstein and great literature and figure we're all just ignorant fools compared to the past. There are a lot of people who think deeply. Thanks to the Internet, they are able to think more deeply about more things." Ray Kurzweill, an author, entrepreneur, and futurist, also thinks Carr's argument is bunk. "We have many more people engaged in thinking and writing about issues than ever before. There are 200 million blogs in China alone—despite the censorship."

These critics certainly have a point. The best of us will benefit hugely from the Internet. As with any form of new technology, how you use it dictates its usefulness. Regardless, Carr seems to understand that his arguments will not slow down the Netification of society. Nowhere in the book does he bother to offer any actual prescriptions for the problem he sees.

Carr, however, fears the Internet will actually cause the brain to take its first step backward in centuries. Our cave-dwelling ancestors were consumed with immediate concerns—run from the lion, kill the mastodon, get out of the rain. Then various media provided an abstract way of thinking about the world. The map helped us explore other lands, establish trading routes, and draw up battle plans. The clock and calendar raised our productivity by enabling us to organize our time. Then came writing. Over time, especially after Gutenberg, the book turbocharged our ability to think conceptually and deeply about the world around us.

Americans now spend 8.5 hours a day frenetically interacting with their PCs, TVs, or, increasingly, the smartphones that follow them everywhere. In the process, writes Carr, we are reverting to our roots as data processors. "What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest."

Whether Carr is right or not isn't really the point. Other than obvious problems such as child porn and online fraud, there's been very little hesitation or contemplation about the side effects of the Net as we race to take advantage of its bounties. At the very least, Carr will have done an important service by making people think just a bit differently the next time they find themselves Twittering their hours away. It may be more than a waste of time. It may also waste our brains.