The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

In 1936, Alan Turing introduced the idea of a general computing machine; rather than creating distinct machines for a variety of processes—a telephone, a word processor, a telegraph, a phonograph—Turing proposed a programmable computer: one machine that can be programmed for any process. Turing died in 1954, the same year that the earliest computer prototypes were put into production. Carr writes, “[B]ecause the different sorts of information distributed by traditional media—words, numbers, sounds, images, moving pictures—can all be translated into digital code, they can all be ‘computed’” (82). The computer technology absorbs other media as its computations become faster and more precise than the original media. For example, the earliest computers only processed words, not images, because any attempt to compute images took far longer than developing film, but as computers increased in speed, they could process images faster than a person in a darkroom. Carr explains that the Internet is a network of these computers, and as more programs move onto the Internet itself (the cloud), the Internet seems to be absorbing even the computer itself. 

Through references to several media use studies, Carr explains that people’s increased use of the Internet as an all-purpose tool has decreased people’s use of books and other printed media.