Shallow Water is More Dangerous Than The Internet

The premise of Nicholas Carr's new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is that reading on the internet is not the same as reading an actual book, and he proves this on the molecular level, with research from neuroscience and psychology. It turns out that there's nothing like a book-- an analog book made of paper pages-- as a delivery system for putting knowledge into a human brain . . . to take short-term memories and make them long-term, you need a "thimbleful by thimbleful" approach, and if things move too fast-- hyper-links, images, e-mail and Twitter interruptions, filler-- then you will experience "cognitive overload" and remember very little.

I'm not going to argue against Carr's thesis, as many critics have. I think they are scared of his findings because, like everyone else in the free world, they are spending a hell of a lot of time on the net, and they don't want to face the music. I'm also not going to agree with the majority of people that say the internet is making us smarter. I agree with Carr. Google is making us stupid. And the Ghoogles are making us stupider. Many people have said that the knowledge stored on the internet, readily accessible and search-able, allows us to free up our brains for other thoughts, but this is patently false. The more we have in our own brains, the better we can think. And study after study has proven that the more facts you know, the better you are at reading and memorizing new facts. Paradoxically, our brains are not like computers with finite memories. When an actor memorizes the lines for a play, it doesn't make it more difficult for him to memorize the lines for his next play; in fact, it makes it easier.  When the Teej memorizes statistics about every college basketball player in the nation, it doesn't hinder his ability to quote lines from bad '80's movies (but not a particular good '80's movie). When Igor learned about vajazzling, it didn't erase his memories of every single thing every person he was acquainted with did or said during college.

But what Nicholar Carr is forgetting is that having the internet around may make students more likely to read something-- even if it is hyper-linked and on a screen-- rather than do a host of other things . . . things not even remotely like reading . . . and perhaps that's not a bad thing. When I was young, in high school and college, I didn't have access to the internet. I think Al Gore had invented it, but he hadn't told anyone about it yet. And so I read plenty of actual books. Despite all this deep thinking, I was involved in some pretty stupid stuff. I hit my head a lot. Once I dove into a river, drunk, with the intention of riding a cooler down some rapids, but-- luckily-- the spot I chose was six inches of shallow water over a black rock. I had to be fished out, unconscious, with a broken tooth, but I probably wouldn't have survived the rapids. Conclusion: diving into shallow water is more dangerous than the "shallow reading" that we do on G:TB.

I often chose to bang my head against another person's head . . . I'd pretend I had a secret to tell them and then SMASH! My friends all considered this social head-butting good fun. The things I witnessed were astounding-- and I can't be particularly specific here because I don't want to put any of the G:TB staff at risk for prosecution-- and I should point out that I was never directly involved in these things, in fact, maybe they didn't happen at all-- but I'm talking about daring ledge dives, risking life and limb to fix a TV aerial, arson, fisticuffs, vandalism, pumpkin chucking, drug use and moving bookshelves, high speed chases on stolen bicycles, keg filching, strudel stealing, DEA posing, projectile vomiting for fun and profit, the planting of preserved reptiles and amphibians, plenty of public nudity and hundreds of other stupid, dangerous, and very analog activities that we did to while away the time (Igor's memory on this topic is better than mine).

My hypothesis is this: if we had the internet to tool around on, we might have been a bit dumber, but we would have been a hell of a lot safer. There's a lot of discussion about how awful cyber-bullying is today, but is it worse than real bullying? Or drinking a shitload of bourbon and going out to fight townies? Or using an SUV to drag people around on a rope in a snow covered parking lot? Or whipping bottles at people? Or taking your shirt off so someone can serve a ping-pong ball at your bare chest? Maybe cyber-bullying is worse than pong-ping, but it's not worse than having to bend over and let a grown man paddle your ass with a wooden plank.

In fact (perhaps from reading all those regular books) we were too smart. We were too smart, with too much free time (when you were this smart, you didn't need to go to class) and no Facebook to occupy our time and dumb us down. So if you ventured into my fraternity, you might find someone riding a giant table up and down a hall soaked with citrus, drinking sangria out of a wok. Or tossing a flaming frozen duck off a balcony at a passerby (and remember, I was never directly involved with these incidents . . . I just happened to witness them). Or stumbling drunk out of a girl's bed, urinating in her closet, and then attempting to put on her pants. Or any number of things that our staff could probably remember and describe better than me (because I was never there). Would these things have happened if we had the internet? We'll never know, but I'm hoping my children will watch YouTube videos of people playing the "there's no reason for that" game instead of actually participating themselves.

The positive thing for the staff of G:TB is this: we can claim that we represent the last "intellectual," generation, and though we are dumbing ourselves down each and every day with our internet use here at G:TB, at least we have our traditional education to rely on as our bedrock . . . unless, of course, instead of reading books, you spent your youth watching Network Television.