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The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
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Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”―Michael Agger, Slate
“Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”―from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer―Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.
Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic―a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption―and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.
Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes―Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive―even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.
Review
― The 2011 Pulitzer Prize Committee
"A must-read for any desk jockey concerned about the Web’s deleterious effects on the mind."
― Newsweek
"Starred Review. Carr provides a deep, enlightening examination of how the Internet influences the brain and its neural pathways. Carr’s analysis incorporates a wealth of neuroscience and other research, as well as philosophy, science, history and cultural developments ... His fantastic investigation of the effect of the Internet on our neurological selves concludes with a very humanistic petition for balancing our human and computer interactions ... Highly recommended."
― Library Journal
"This is a measured manifesto. Even as Carr bemoans his vanishing attention span, he’s careful to note the usefulness of the Internet, which provides us with access to a near infinitude of information. We might be consigned to the intellectual shallows, but these shallows are as wide as a vast ocean."
― Jonah Lehrer, The New York Times Book Review
"This is a lovely story well told―an ode to a quieter, less frenetic time when reading was more than skimming and thought was more than mere recitation."
― San Francisco Chronicle
"The Shallows isn’t McLuhan’s Understanding Media, but the curiosity rather than trepidation with which Carr reports on the effects of online culture pulls him well into line with his predecessor . . . Carr’s ability to crosscut between cognitive studies involving monkeys and eerily prescient prefigurations of the modern computer opens a line of inquiry into the relationship between human and technology."
― Ellen Wernecke,, The Onion A.V. Club
"The subtitle of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains leads one to expect a polemic in the tradition of those published in the 1950s about how rock ’n’ roll was corrupting the nation’s youth ... But this is no such book. It is a patient and rewarding popularization of some of the research being done at the frontiers of brain science ... Mild-mannered, never polemical, with nothing of the Luddite about him, Carr makes his points with a lot of apt citations and wide-ranging erudition."
― Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times
"Nicholas Carr has written an important and timely book. See if you can stay off the web long enough to read it!"
― Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
"Neither a tub-thumpingly alarmist jeremiad nor a breathlessly Panglossian ode to the digital self, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is a deeply thoughtful, surprising exploration of our “frenzied” psyches in the age of the Internet. Whether you do it in pixels or pages, read this book."
― Tom Vanderbilt, author, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
"Nicholas Carr carefully examines the most important topic in contemporary culture―the mental and social transformation created by our new electronic environment. Without ever losing sight of the larger questions at stake, he calmly demolishes the clichés that have dominated discussions about the Internet. Witty, ambitious, and immensely readable, The Shallows actually manages to describe the weird, new, artificial world in which we now live."
― Dana Gioia, poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts
"The core of education is this: developing the capacity to concentrate. The fruits of this capacity we call civilization. But all that is finished, perhaps. Welcome to the shallows, where the un-educating of homo sapiens begins. Nicholas Carr does a wonderful job synthesizing the recent cognitive research. In doing so, he gently refutes the ideologists of progress, and shows what is really at stake in the daily habits of our wired lives: the re-constitution of our minds. What emerges for the reader, inexorably, is the suspicion that we have well and truly screwed ourselves."
― Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class As Soulcraft
"Ultimately, The Shallows is a book about the preservation of the human capacity for contemplation and wisdom, in an epoch where both appear increasingly threatened. Nick Carr provides a thought-provoking and intellectually courageous account of how the medium of the Internet is changing the way we think now and how future generations will or will not think. Few works could be more important."
― Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
About the Author
- ISBN-109780393339758
- ISBN-13978-0393339758
- PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Publication dateJune 6, 2011
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
- Print length304 pages
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Product details
- ASIN : 0393339750
- Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company (June 6, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780393339758
- ISBN-13 : 978-0393339758
- Item Weight : 10.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #346,218 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #131 in Human-Computer Interaction (Books)
- #338 in Medical Neuropsychology
- #1,111 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Nicholas Carr is an acclaimed writer whose work focuses on technology, economics, and culture. His books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," have been translated into more than 25 languages. He is a visiting professor of sociology at Williams College in Massachusetts and was formerly executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. In 2015, he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association.
A New York Times bestseller when it was first published in 2010 and now hailed as “a modern classic,” "The Shallows" remains a touchstone for debates on technology’s effects on our thoughts and perceptions. A new, expanded edition of "The Shallows" was published in 2020. Carr’s 2014 book "The Glass Cage: Automation and Us," which the New York Review of Books called a “chastening meditation on the human future,” examines the personal and social consequences of our ever growing dependency on computers, robots, and apps. His latest book, "Utopia Is Creepy," collects his best essays, blog posts, and other writings from the past dozen years. The collection is “by turns wry and revelatory,” wrote Discover.
Carr is also the author of two other influential books, "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google" (2008), which the Financial Times called “the best read so far about the significance of the shift to cloud computing,” and the widely discussed and debated "Does IT Matter?" (2004).
Carr has written for many newspapers, magazines, and journals, including the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, Nature, and MIT Technology Review. His essays, including “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “The Great Forgetting,” have been collected in several anthologies, including The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best Technology Writing. Carr is a former member of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors and was a writer-in-residence at the University of California at Berkeley’s journalism school. Since 2005, he has written the popular blog Rough Type, at www.roughtype.com. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English and American Literature and Language, from Harvard University.
More information about Carr's work can be found at his website, www.nicholascarr.com. [Author photo by Scott Keneally.]
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‘Intellectual vibrations’?
‘’In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.’’ (62)
This was primarily a religious, essentially Biblical devotion. How experienced?
“Even the earliest silent readers recognized the striking change in their consciousness that took place as they immersed themselves in the pages of a book. The medieval bishop Isaac of Syria described how, whenever he read to himself,’’
Of course, these were almost overwhelmingly reading religious books, usually the Bible or Greek philosophers. Deep reading. . .
“as in a dream, I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.”
Wow! Who does this? How significant?
“Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn’t involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. That was—and is—the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading. It was the technology of the book that made this “strange anomaly” in our psychological history possible. The brain of the book reader was more than a literate brain. It was a literary brain.” (62)
Carr develops this theme throughout - the importance, even essential - process of ‘deep reading’. For example, even the physical form of the brain changes . . .
“One of the most important lessons we’ve learned from the study of neuroplasticity is that the mental capacities, the very neural circuits, we develop for one purpose can be put to other uses as well. As our ancestors imbued their minds with the discipline to follow a line of argument or narrative through a succession of printed pages, they became more contemplative, reflective, and imaginative. “New thought came more readily to a brain that had already learned how to rearrange itself to read,” says Maryanne Wolf; “the increasingly sophisticated intellectual skills promoted by reading and writing added to our intellectual repertoire.” The quiet of deep reading became, as Stevens understood, “part of the mind.” (74)
Carr emphasizes that this - contemplative, reflective, imaginative - brain is being replaced by the - distracted, shallow brain.
“Jordan Grafman explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively. “Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no,” says Grafman. “The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.”
Well. . .won’t all this extra information help?
“You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.’’ (140)
No ability to challenge ideas? Where is Luther, Galileo, Faraday - when we need them?
THE WATCHDOG AND THE THIEF
One HAL AND ME
Two THE VITAL PATHS - a digression on what the brain thinks about when it thinks about itself
Three TOOLS OF THE MIND
Four THE DEEPENING PAGE - a digression on lee de forest and his amazing audion
Five A MEDIUM OF THE MOST GENERAL NATURE
Six THE VERY IMAGE OF A BOOK
Seven THE JUGGLER’S BRAIN - a digression on the buoyancy of IQ scores
Eight THE CHURCH OF GOOGLE
Nine SEARCH, MEMORY - a digression on the writing of this book
Ten A THING LIKE ME
“What the Net diminishes is Johnson’s primary kind of knowledge: the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give rise to a singular intelligence.’’ (143)
Another theme is the difference between human mental processes and computers. . .
“The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electrical, and genetic, every aspect of human memory—the way it’s formed, maintained, connected, recalled—has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits—ones and zeros—that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between.’’ (188)
Reminds me of the wise man’s illustration of spiritual growth -
“So he went on to say: “In this way the Kingdom of God is just as when a man casts seeds on the ground. He sleeps at night and rises up by day, and the seeds sprout and grow tall—just how, he does not know. On its own the ground bears fruit gradually, first the stalk, then the head, finally the full grain in the head.’’ (Mark 4:26)
A biological metaphor, not a mechanical one!
Carr connects another idea that I had not considered.
“As McLuhan acknowledged, he was far from the first to observe technology’s numbing effect. It’s an ancient idea, one that was given perhaps its most eloquent and ominous expression by the Old Testament psalmist:
“Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men’s hands.
They have mouths, but they speak not;
Eyes have they, but they see not;
They have ears, but they hear not;
Noses have they, but they smell not;
They have hands, but they handle not;
Feet have they, but they walk not;
Neither speak they through their throat.
They that make them are like unto them;
So is every one that trusteth in them.’’
“The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation. The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies. The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, emotion.’’
Of course, the psalmist was condemning idols, not technology. Nevertheless, perhaps Carr has a point, maybe we really are ‘worshipping the work of our own hands’.
At the same time that the Internet is changing the world, bringing us closer together around masses of information, it is changing our ability to think and it is changing our brains in dangerous ways. The issue is not the content of the Internet, but its process.
The human adapts to its tools and its tasks. Give a man a hammer for a lifetime’s work and his body shapes to effectively drive nails. Take away his pen and give him a typewriter with a ball and his prose turns from fluid to staccato. (That happened to Nietzsche in the late nineteenth century.) In that process of adaption the brain, since it is not a machine but an organ, changes. These changes can be seen with instruments and their results observed in human behavior. This is the world of Nicholas Carr.
I will describe a tiny fraction of what the Internet is doing to our brains.
1) The brain, confronted with a glowing screen and the ability to hypertext its way from one interruption to another across the universe of knowledge from what its buddy in Australia thinks of rutabagas, to the spelling of rutabagas to the history of rutabagas to dishes that can be prepared from rutabagas leaves the brain sliding from one fact of surface interest to another fact even less useful, until it occurs to the brain to pursue the prompt on the pop-up menu and check the weather and get off of this slide onto the weather channel where a five minute video on playful seals on San Francisco Bay can be watched for free which does remind the brain that it could slide over to Facebook and find out if anyone “liked” the picture of the family cat posted an hour ago. And many do. Twenty-three “likes,” praise the Lord.
Just as the carpenter’s arm grew it muscles to deal effectively with the hammer the brain changes to succeed in a slippy slidey world of itty bitty bits of knowledge intended to interest momentarily and then disappear.
So what will happen when it confronts a life choice? Will this passive instrument skidding from meaningless bit to another meaningless bit see itself suddenly as an agent? A “decider?” Or will it in panic seek the next button to push, even if that button bears the label “Self Destruct?”
According to Time magazine this is happening now in the Silicon Valley high schools; kids depressed and without a sense of agency pushed around by the ripples on the surface of the Internet are choosing to leave life. Rutabagas have lost their interest. Having your cat liked did not fill the hole intended for having yourself loved. And this child is not accustomed to doing things about things. This child does not do. This child is done to. With the same alacrity that he or she pursued the prompt to watch the seals he or she may “decide” it is time to end this.
2) I discovered my wife of the last forty-three years with whom I have raised two children and now five grandchildren with much happiness when while sitting on her front lawn, I seriously told her my goals in life. She thought they were so funny she actually rolled over laughing.
If I had instituted a computer search what algorithm would have found her an appropriate match? Yet this brain of mine sorted through whatever book-formed channels it had and locked in immediately on her as the “one,” the antidote to the man who takes himself too seriously. The Internet would have provided me many potential companions, each more serious than the last. That is the way it works. It finds my interests and then adds to the pile. If I follow its suggestions I become narrower and narrower, a better candidate to respond to the advertisers, a defined target, and a wealth of possibilities pass me by.
3) For something to remain in long-term memory it must spend two hours in short term memory. (There is actually a tiny physical growth that must happen.) But on the trip through rutabaga land, things go in and out too quickly to be grafted on the long-term nodules. Of course it still exists in the computer’s memory. When you know you need it, it can be sought. However the advantage of the human memory is that it coughs up stored information when you need it but do not know you need it. Not only does your intellect call on your memory, but your memory initiates conversations with your intellect. You won’t have that ability any longer. And since your long-term memory is not being used the section of the brain devoted to long-term memory has already begun to shrink.
Distant memories of your mother’s tears, your father’s embrace, your sisters admiration and your little brother’s needs will be crowded out of the brain, and I doubt if you will find them in Internet land either.
4) There are now residential therapy centers to assist the hooked to unhook from the Internet. The Internet lights up the same section of the brain as does cocaine. Didn’t’ know those grade school kids were getting a buzz? Makes what may be happening to my grandchildren a little less cute and a little less funny.
Read The Shallows yourself. What I have written is just a corner of the future described there. See if it scares you! And if it does, see who else you can scare with it. Hope they have enough of an attention span left to read the book. (A sign of the times is that people who used to write books no longer can read them. Not enough slippy and slidey. Boring!)
Can the majority of us survive without complex and nuanced thought? Without deep and poignant memories? Do we want to?
Top reviews from other countries
I am honestly in love with this book. It is super interesting and it does not only talk about the internet, but also about other technologies like reading, writing, clocks and other tools that we use and how our brain starts to perceive them as extensions of our body or mind and how that affects us.
There is only one thing that I disagreed with. The author claims that some e-books are distractive and contain hyperlinks which would render deep reading impossible. I have read many things on my kindle, and if anything, the kindle has helped me stay focused as I could not simply tap on a word and see its meaning without having to use my phone which would bombard me with notifications the second I turned on the internet. However, I sort of know what the author was referring to. Funnily enough, I could click on a few books that the author has mentioned himself in this book and I did have to decide whenever I saw the book symbol next to the title if I did or did not want to check out the book. I did click on one of the links. This however disrupted the session of deep reading that I was having. Links inside of books can indeed get distracting or interrupt your reading, so I hope that fewer people will resort to hyperlinking everything inside books.
Otherwise, I am so happy to have read this book and I am tempted to buy a paper version of it as well. I'd totally recommend it if you are interested in how your brain works and reacts to changes in environment, tools and so on. It is very interesting to find out what changed people's minds in the past and what is happening to our minds today.









