The Shallows: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

In this chapter, Carr turns his attention to the fate of the printed book. To some extent, Carr argues, the book has remained fairly safe from the Net’s influence. You don’t have to worry about a book breaking, there is far less eye fatigue, and engaging physically with a book offers a pleasure that reading Internet text cannot. However, though it has taken a bit for e-books to get off the ground, digital readers are making improvements in an attempt to compete with the old-fashioned intellectual technology of books. New high-resolution screens have reduced eye strain and features like the ability to enlarge type or sound out words are boons for the elderly. The ability to download as many books to your reader as you can mp3s to an iPod has a definite appeal. The e-book has started to take hold.

Carr emphasizes that the experience of reading on an e-reader is much different than the experience of reading a paper book. The Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader, has a built-in wireless component allowing you to purchase new books, read newspapers, search the web, etc. One of the most notable Kindle features is the incorporation of links. You can be redirected to an article on related topics, a word’s definition, or Google search results. The author Steven Johnson worries that the new dynamic offered by the e-book, where a world of pertaining information is so easily searchable, will cause us to lose the total immersion that is the classic joy of book reading. Of the digitized book, Carr writes: “It loses what the late John Updike called its ‘edges’ and dissolves into the vast, roiling waters of the Net.” Reading printed books in e-book form has, in other words, become as distracting as reading websites.

The digitization of the book is influencing how new books are produced as well. The more readers find books using online search engines, the higher the pressure for writers to craft their books with the question of how their book could get clicks in mind. Essayist Caleb Crain describes the coming phenomenon as a trend towards “groupiness” in writing and reading, where people read “for the sake of a feeling of belonging” rather than enlightenment. Writers, Carr worries, are in the same vein moving away from risky experimentation and towards palatable and accessible styles. The odd result is that we are reversing a historical pattern. The era of mass book reading is coming to a close, and literary readers are again becoming a minority group.

Throughout history, Carr explains, people who believed that new technologies would replace books have always been wrong. Phonograph lovers thought soon all books would be recorded as audio, but listening didn’t replace reading. Neither have technologies like the Internet or TV, but our preoccupation with these new technologies means we devote less time than ever to actually reading solid books. They may still be around, but we are no longer, Carr argues, in the age of print.

Scholars like Clay Shirky from NYU are fine with this change. Shirky argues that people don’t need or want to read Tolstoy or Proust anymore for good reason. Those big tomes and the literary reading they invite were, to Shirky, “just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access.” His point is that we only read such long works because a more efficient way of learning wasn’t yet available. People like Shirky represent the new anti-literary mind, but Carr is skeptical of his argument. He worries that Shirky’s attitude is less an argument than a convenient way to avoid guilt about wanting to constantly slip into the distracting, addictive juggling act of online life. Carr’s conclusion in this chapter is that we have rejected the individual, focused intellectual tradition for a working life preoccupied with juggling a multiplicity of tasks.