The Shallows: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Carr opens this chapter with Alan Turing and hisTuring machine, an imaginary device that anticipated the modern computer. Turing’s machine would be a “universal machine” able to be programmed for any conceivable purpose. However, even Turing admitted his idea was limited by speed, or computing time, which was very slow in the early 20th century. In Turing’s time, it was far faster and cheaper to have a man in a darkroom render a photograph than it was for the earliest digital computer to complete the same task. Today the Internet, no longer limited by speed, has absorbed and digitized every sort of information imaginable, taking Turing’s idea to new heights. The cost of a computing task, Carr reports, has dropped by 99.9% since the 1960s.

The web’s evolution offers a compressed history of media, having absorbed the functionality of everything from Gutenberg’s press to the movie theater. Text was first, as typographical symbols were the easiest to represent. Next, with the lowered cost of bandwidth, web pages began to incorporate photographs and drawings. Soon the job of radios and phonographs was absorbed by the Net too, and when MP3s were invented, sound files could be compressed for easy sharing. Finally, the Net consumed movie theaters, able to quickly transmit not only video but also elaborate 3D games.

Carr points out that the difference between the Net and other mass media is that the channel of communication goes both ways. Not only does the Net connect you with businesses, it provides a platform for personal interaction. Sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube successfully rely on users to provide the enormous amount of content offered.

As the speed and capacities of the Internet increased, the amount of time we spend logged on has skyrocketed. A 2009 study reported that adults were spending an average of twelve hours online a week, not counting time on handheld phones. Carr warns us, too, against the assumption that much of this Net use is being taken from leisure time otherwise devoted to TV. Nielsen studies show that as Net use has increased, the time Americans devote to television has increased as well. The point being: Net use has only increased the time Americans spend in front of screens. Users for example, often watch TV as they operate both a laptop and a mobile phone.

What is definitely decreasing is the time spent reading print medium like newspapers, magazines and books. A 2008 study reported that young adults, the most avid Net users, spent a mere 49 minutes a week reading printed matter. Though we are definitely reading more words in total due to the amount of text on the Net, less and less of this text is in paper form. Carr brings it back to Turing, stating: “Once information is digitized, the boundaries between media dissolve.” Things like cassettes, spools, phonographs––tools specific to their medium––have been replaced by the faster, cheaper, all-purpose-tool of the Internet.

Though people still collect records and use film cameras, there is no question that such items have lost their economic power and, as a result, have been shelved as what Carr calls “progress’s dead ends.” While the benefits of the Internet––connectivity, accessibility––are many, there are consequences to pushing aside the various physical mediums we used to use and replacing them with a universal medium. The DVD industry, the United States post office, and the newspaper business have all fallen on hard financial times, with newspapers and journals putting all resources into digital outlets, and many publications ceasing to exist all together.

Carr points out that the process of digitizing other mediums––particularly text––recreates content in the internet’s image. In other words, the reading experience online is intensely different than on paper. The content is broken down, strewn with hyperlinks, and set against the distracting background of all the other information the Net has absorbed. While hyperlinks increase the ease with which we can jump between documents, the nature of Net searches encourages the fragmentation of texts. The result is that we skip from fragment to fragment at lightning pace. Quoting the blogger Cory Doctorow, Carr concludes that computers plunge us into an “ecosystem of interruption technologies.”

As people’s minds grow used to the Internet’s way of unbundling and fragmenting content into easily consumed bits, other media are evolving to mimic the Internet’s style. Magazines like Rolling Stone no longer publish sprawling, 7,000 word features, but instead a jumble of shorter pieces. Newspapers focus on headlines, summaries, and tables to make skimming their contents easier. Television networks use text crawls on the screen to run pop-up ads and shows like Late Night with Jimmy Fallon are written to encourage breaking up the content. The writers know that video hubs like Hulu will later choose select clips to show for free. Even experiences in the real world are becoming mediated. Certain symphonies and theaters encourage audience usage of platforms like Twitter during performances so the audience can engage in group commentary whilst the performance is taking place. The experience of the classic library is changing too, becoming less and less a place to go for free reading time and increasingly synonymous with free Wi-Fi.