The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr remains a powerful book (published 2011) regarding how our brains have re-wired in the age of the internet. I began reading just as COVID-19 began taking hold. How will our brains react to this pandemic?
Over the course of Carr’s chapters the world instantly became remote workers.
According to Carr’s conclusions, our brains will re-wire again adjusting to our new global working environments. Actually this will occur within a very short period of time.
The source for his book originated from an article Carr actually wrote for The New Yorker called “is google making us stupid” back in 2008. There is a chapter dedicated to Google Search.
Does The Shallows reveal new internet changes to human behavior? No, Carr shows that history’s ‘drastic changes’ regarding access to new technology dates even beyond Nietzsche and Freud. Their technology change? The typewriter was a very dynamic change from Gutenberg’s printing press. Approaches to cognitive thought was drastically changed by the technology available to Freud’s era: powerful microscopes.