Unplug the "interruption machine"

Nicholas Carr has been writing about technology for over two decades. His new book, The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains, explores how the fast-moving online world is dehumanizing us, and extols the value of reading books.

Question. Your book has drawn criticism from journalists such as Nick Bilton, of The New York Times tech blog Bits, who argues that it is much more natural for humans to diversify their attention than to concentrate on one thing.

Answer. Just because something is more primitive or more natural doesn't mean it's more human. Reading a book is probably unnatural, but saying that the natural is necessarily better misses the point. We trained ourselves to do it and it was difficult, but it gave us this valuable new way of using our minds that wasn't available many centuries ago when we constantly shifted from one thing to another. So maybe we shouldn't want to go back to that primitiveness if it causes us to lose some of our deepest ways of thinking.

"Technology, like the map or clock, isn't neutral; it influences our choices"

"In my opinion, we are heading toward a utilitarian ideal of the human mind"

Q. The internet causes us to switch constantly between content, yet precisely because of this it offers us a vast amount of information. Just two decades ago it would have been unthinkable.

A. It's true and that is very valuable, but the internet also encourages us to focus on the short and the quick, leading us away from focusing with more attentiveness on one thing. My book argues that the new media promote different ways of thinking and encourage multitasking rather than concentration. When you open a book there is nothing else going on; it shields you from distraction. You turn on a computer and it is an interruption machine.

Q. But ultimately isn't it an individual choice how we use technology?

A. It is and it isn't. Ultimately you can be very disciplined, but technology encourages us to behave in certain ways. Technology changes social norms, behaviors and expectations, and we feel like we are expected to be constantly shifting our attention. Technology, like the map or the clock, is not neutral; it influences the choices we make.

Q. In your book you talk about what we lose and though you mention what we gain, you barely touch on the issue of social networks and how, thanks to them, we have an invaluable tool for sharing information.

A. It is true: you share with a broader group of people. And many people that didn't have a way to share their thoughts and creations before can now do so and that is an important benefit. The broader point is that the only reason the internet is having such a big effect on the way we think is because it is useful, enjoyable and fun. If it weren't we wouldn't be so drawn to using these technologies so frequently and intensely: we use them because we feel attracted to them; nobody is forcing us to.

Q. However, you seem to suggest in your book that new technologies undermine our individual freedoms.

A. The essence of personal freedom is that you choose what you pay attention to. Technology is determining what we are paying attention to and thus I think it does begin to erode the freedom of being in control of our thoughts and we begin to lose the ability to choose what information to pay attention to.

Q. Wikipedia is a good example of large-scale collaboration that would have been unthinkable before the internet. It just turned 10 years old.

A. The most interesting thing about Wikipedia is the tension between the advantages of openness and vast collaboration and the need to enforce limits, create hierarchies and impose policy over it in order to gain higher quality. One of the lessons of Wikipedia is that total openness doesn't work too well.

Q. And what do you think about projects like Google Books? You don't seem very optimistic in your book.

A. The advantages of having all books available online are undeniable. But while access is one thing, how we read books is another. Google thinks in terms of snippets that can be delivered in short bits, and it threatens the deep reading that books encourage. My fear about Google Books is that it will make us into superficial, non-attentive readers.

Q. But devices like the Kindle allow us to read comfortably, without distractions.

A. Kindle does a good job at replicating the printed page. But the history of gadgets teaches us that manufacturers will always add features and try to offer more than the competition. So I doubt they will waste much time in making them more sophisticated and therefore with more distractions

Q. The economist Max Otte says that despite the quantity of information available, we are more uninformed than ever and that this contributes to bringing us closer to a form of neo-feudalism that is destroying the middle class. Do you agree?

A. To a certain degree sure, in some areas. If you look at the way the world of software has affected job creation and the distribution of wealth, we are undoubtedly moving away from middle classes to a much more extreme case of concentrated wealth. I wrote about this in the book The Big Switch. The growth of the middle class we experimented after WWII is clearly in reverse.

Q. Do you have the solution to save us?

A. As as writer I try to describe complex phenomena; I don't see myself as a self-help writer. In my opinion we are heading toward a very utilitarian ideal of the human mind where what's important is how efficient you are at processing information, and we are moving away from the open-ended ideal of thought that does not necessarily have a practical end but that nevertheless stimulates creativity. Research shows us that some forms of deep thinking require quiet, contemplativeness and separating yourself from distractions. If you are constantly distracted, do you have those times to be more contemplative? If we lose those are we going to lose some of the deepest sources of distinctive thinking? I think that as individuals we can escape the consequences of this change in our behavior, but for society as a whole there may be no going back.