Nicholas Carr The Shallows Essay

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In society, the lack of attention people have for tasks has become a kind of joke. There are “those millennial” comments when a group of teenagers walk by, all on their phones; or if there is a family sat at the dinner table who would much rather watch the television than discuss the day with each other. It seems to be worked into American life, something to be teased about instead of something worrisome. Technology being at your fingertips twenty-four hours a day is just part of life, it is what it is. This is a reality, however, that Nicholas Carr refuses to have faith in. In his novel The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, he explores the dependency, or addiction, that society today has on technology, and more specifically the Internet. Carr believes that the attention span of society is shrinking, and that the ability to deeply read and process information is going away with …show more content…
It is argued that “the key to memory consolidation is attentiveness” (Carr, 193). Basically, in order for the systems of memory to work, one must attend to the situation at hand. Carr doesn’t believe that this is happening. Memories and connections cannot be made due to the complete attention overload that the Internet gives the viewer. Someone viewing things on the Internet simply are unable to have “intense intellectual or emotional engagement” (Carr, 193) that are necessary for memories to be stored long-term. According to Carr, the opposite is actually happening. Because of the internet, he argues, all of the different messages entering our minds “not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention to any one thing” (Carr, 194). Because of the memory overload, the process of remembering can’t even begin. The brain, and society, is “drowning in information” with not enough attention “to make sense of that information” (Anderson,
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