Carr's The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains?

Nicholas Carr’s nonfiction book The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains is about how the internet is changing the way society thinks. As more technology is developed, the faster the way that thinking is altered. Carr provides multiple sources to credit his basis of the findings and gives multiple examples of the effects of the increase in internet usage. The advancements in technologies not only affect the speed of getting information, but also the manner in which the information can be seen. This affects humans’ abilities to multitask, read, and comprehend.
Society uses the internet more often than what is recommended, which results in a physically altered brain. People used to search for information on a web page from left to right, but now from the restructured brain, more …show more content…
This results in less comprehension of the information read, and in return results in a habit of decreasing working memory, which is the memory time frame between short-term and long-term. This strain in the working-memory is the factor behind the decreasing ability to retain content due to the distracting links and advertisements. Despite this alteration of the human brain, Carr is not advocating for a decrease in internet consumption. He merely wants society to know of the sacrifices subconsciously made when using the internet. Carr wants the technologically-savvy millennials to understand the side effects behind receiving information from the internet instead of print media. In past generations, people consumed their news by reading from a printed source, which fostered the efficiency of their memory, and by conversing with other people, which fostered social skills. Now that technology advancements have become the basis of society’s lifestyle, society is losing their ability to cope without technological luxuries, like ebooks and the thousands of current-event websites. Technology has become the new drug addiction for today’s