Bookshelf

THE SHALLOWS By Nicholas Carr Atlantic Books €14 IT MAY seem antediluvian to anyone under 40, but I actually remember life before TV, never mind the Net. While reading Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, his take on how the internet revolution is changing the way we read, think and even the way our brains are hardwired, the origins of my own technological evolution came flooding back to me.[private] My granny lived in Portlaoise and we spent a goodly number of holidays there. Across the road from her house in Coote Street lived the manager of Shaw's department store, a very important person at that time. We used to play with his children and one day, while engaged in hide and seek or some similar activity, I chanced to peep through his sitting room window and can still remember my complete astonishment and awe, these many years later. Sitting in the corner of the room was a box with moving pictures and a man talking. I was rooted to the spot. I'd been to the cinema but having a mini cinema in the best room was a totally alien concept to me. The man of the house noticed me peering in and, being the kindly sort, ushered me inside for a closer look. I have an image of Charles Mitchel reading the news but that could be a trick of memory. There's no trick of memory, however, in my recollection of being utterly mesmerised and transfixed. What more could a person want from life than having such an apparatus in their own home? I rushed home to inform my parents of my discovery and was nonplussed to realise that they knew about this TV phenomenon all along. Was I the last to know? Events moved very quickly after that and one day, on my way home from school in Castlebar, a neighbour informed me that Kilkelly's van was outside our house and we were getting the â€ËœTelly'. I was officially part of the communications revolution that swept the globe in the latter half of the 20th century. And now we have the Internet and Nicholas Carr is busy measuring the huge impact this global phenomenon is having on mankind. I'm reminded of when Mao was asked what impact the French Revolution had on Western society and he replied 'it's too early to tell.' Technological change is advancing at such a rate that no sooner do we try and assess the impact of one development, than another two push it aside and take over. But Carr is no Luddite. He appreciates and frequently makes use of the advantages provided by search-engines for academics such as himself, but he also quotes Ivy League scholars who admit to not reading books anymore, preferring to graze on information on the Net. This worries him. When television first exploded onto my consciousness at a tender age, my mother would warn me that too much TV would rot my brain. It was rationed in our house and if we got to watch Mr Ed the Talking Horse or The Virginian, this had to be balanced out by a session of Buntús Cainte, an RTE production designed to get us all conversant in the first language. Maybe the TV did rot my brain. My older brother, who was an established reader before the TV arrived, continued the habit whereas I was an adult before I willingly picked up a book. Hardly empirical evidence I know, but ... Carr points out that we've always had predictions of disaster when new technology arrived. Socrates lamented the invention of the book because he feared it would foster forgetfulness among scholars trained in the oral tradition. Carr makes much of Gutenberg's invention of the mass printing press about 500 years ago, as he argues that this was the last time before the Internet that technology impacted so significantly on our intellectual capabilities. There again, when the telegraph came along in the 19th century, it was seriously argued that it caused mental illness. We may laugh at that now but it seems that every time someone tries to put up a mobile phone mast today, opponents put forward many of the same arguments. After the telegraph along came radio and TV and it was feared children would never read again. Socrates would have been delighted. 'Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski,' Carr writes and much of this book is given over to the question as to whether we are sabotaging ourselves, trading the ability for sustained attention for the frantic superficiality of the Net. His basic thesis seems to be that while the Net is very useful, it does more harm than good in terms of fostering intelligence and the ability to think creatively, maintain focus and remember. He emphasises the plasticity of our brains and how our grey matter can adapt to changing circumstances. Basically, he warns that the Net generation is entering the intellectual shallows of the title and, I assume, that our grandchildren will all be zombies. Perversely, I take great comfort from the evidence he presents concerning recent scientific discoveries on the plasticity of the human brain. If it is that adaptable, then as technology changes again, it will mould itself accordingly. I may not want to follow it down these paths but I can't really see any devastating consequences for the species if others do. There again, I never managed to finish Joyce's Ulysses so my odd trawl on the Net is not going to set the national intelligence quotient back that much. To elaborate a little further on this theme (I may yet write a thesis on it) I read in a magazine, one made of dead trees and ink, that learning to read uses up so much of a child's brain capacity, that it has to poach on the areas that were used by our ancestors to recognise form and identify aspects of the natural world. So we learn to read a book, warning us of the dangers of eating poisonous berries, at the cost of instinctively keeping away from them as we can observe the birds doing. Do we bemoan this loss or simply accept it as part of our evolution? I'd love to elaborate further still but I have to run, I'm bidding on a foot spa on eBay.[/private]