Internet Negativism or Techno-Pessimism

A Review of Two Books by Nicholas Carr

I considered some of the issues raised by “The Shallows” in Chapter 2 of my book “Collisions in the Digital Paradigm: Law and Rule making in the Internet Age” and the discussion of neuroplasticity was addressed in that book and has been used in redrafted form in this article.

In the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic an article by Nicholas Carr was published and attracted considerable attention.

The article was entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains”

Th article was followed in 2010 by a book by Carr entitled “The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember”.

The article and the subsequent book argued that the Internet might have detrimental effects on cognition that diminish the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Despite the title, the article is not specifically targeted at Google, but more at the cognitive impact of the Internet and World Wide Web.

Prior to the publication of Carr's Atlantic essay, critics had long been concerned about the potential for electronic media to supplant literary reading.

In 1994, American academic Sven Birkerts published a book titled The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, consisting of a collection of essays that declaimed against the declining influence of literary culture—the tastes in literature that are favored by a social group—with a central premise among the essays asserting that alternative delivery formats for the book are inferior to the paper incarnation.

Birkerts was spurred to write the book after his experience with a class he taught in the fall of 1992, where the students had little appreciation for the literature he had assigned them, stemming from, in his opinion, their inaptitude for the variety of skills involved in deep reading.

In "Perseus Unbound", an essay from the book, Birkerts presented several reservations toward the application of interactive technologies to educational instruction, cautioning that the "long-term cognitive effects of these new processes of data absorption" were unknown and that they could yield "an expansion of the short-term memory banks and a correlative atrophying of long-term memory".

Interestingly enough, although Birkerts’ eloquent, carefully written and carefully argued book was written as long ago as 1994 in the November 2024 issue of The Atlantic Rose Horowitch wrote an article entitled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”.

She pointed out that many students arrive at college but are not prepared to read books. She records that one student at high school had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

It would seem that Birkerts’ concerns about the loss of deep reading skills may have been prescient at the time but who would have thought that extended engagement with a book was no longer the norm.

Twenty years ago classes would have no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now students complain that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

Horowitch notes:

“Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.”

In an eerie reflection of Birkerts’ comments, Horowitch writes

“Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.”

Concerns were also expressed by developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf in her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Whereas Birkerts approached the issue from a cultural-historical perspective, Wolf looked at the problem from a scientific angle to defend reading and print culture.

In a subsequent article in the Boston Globe Wolf expressed her grave concern that the development of knowledge in children who are heavy users of the Internet could produce mere "decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their googled universes", and cautioned that the web's "immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge.”

Nicholas Carr’s “Google” article and “The Shallows” can be read together. His thesis is that the internet is responsible for the dumbing down of society based upon the way in which our minds respond both to the wealth of information and its availability.

The starting point for the Google article was Carr’s 2008 book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google. Carr observed that he had difficulties remaining engaged with not only books he had to read but even books that he found very interesting – in other words Birkerts’ “deep reading”.

The difficulties with deep reading for Carr seemed to stem from spending too much time on the Internet and that constantly using the Internet might reduce one's ability to concentrate and reflect on content.

Carr discussed how concentration might be impaired by Internet usage. He references the historical example of Nietzsche, who used a typewriter, which was new during his time in the 1880s. Allegedly, Nietzsche's writing style changed after the advent of the typewriter.

This could be explained by Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” but Carr attributed this to neuroplasticity - the ability of the brain to adapt to and learn from new stimuli.

The neuroplasticity argument is picked up by Susan Greenfield who believes the web is an instant gratification engine, reinforcing behaviours and neuronal connections that are making adults more childlike and kids hungry for information that is presented in a super simplistic way but in fact reduces their understanding of it. Greenfield is of the view that the web spoon feeds us things to capture our attention. This means we are learning to constantly seek out material that stimulates us and our plastic minds are being rewarded by our “quick click” behaviour. We want new interactive experiences and we want them now.

Greenfields article was “Living On-line is Changing Our Brains” New Scientist, 3 August 2011

For this and for her assertions of “internet addiction” she has she has been criticised by Dr. Ben Goldacre for claiming that technology has adverse effects on the human brain, without having published any research, and retracting some claims when challenged.

Goldacre suggested that “A scientist with enduring concerns about a serious widespread risk would normally set out their concerns clearly, to other scientists, in a scientific paper” Ben Goldacre, “Serious Claims Belong in a Serious Scientific Paper” The Guardian 21 October 2011

Greenfield’s view is alsodisputed by Aleks Krotoski who firstly observed that there is no evidential support for Greenfield’s propositions which pre-suppose that once we used the web we will forever online and never log off again.

According to Greenfield, says Krotoski, we become connected to our computers and other devices in a co-dependent exclusive almost biological way ignoring where how and why we are connecting. Krotoski, for example, disputes internet addiction, internet use disorder or neurological rewiring.

Krotoski developed her arguments in Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You (Faber, London 2013). She also developed her ideas at a presentation at the Writers and Readers Festival, Auckland 19 May 2013 and in a personal discussion between us after he presentation.

Like Krotoski, William Bernstein in his book Masters of the Word (Atlantic Books, London 2013) especially in chapter 8 “The Comrades Who Couldn’t Broadcast Straight” and pp.263 and following rejects Carr’s thesis. Bernstein points out that neuroplasticity is a phenomenon well known to brain researchers. He then goes on to ask and answer Carr’s question

“Does the Web rewire your brain? You bet; so does everything you actively or passively experience. Literacy is possibly the most potent cerebral rewire of all; for five thousand years humans have been reassigning brain areas formerly needed for survival in the natural environment to the processing of printed abstractions. Some of this commandeered real estate has almost certainly been grabbed, in its turn, by the increasing role of computers and the Internet in everyday post-industrial life. Plus ca change.”

Bernstein then goes on to examine Carr’s theory that Internet use decreases concentration on the matter at hand, emphasising the use of hyperlinks. Bernstein accepts that we have better information retention if it is placed in front of us on one page rather than chasing it through a maze of hypertext links. On the other hand, he observes, real life rarely supplies us with precisely the information that we need in one document. Those skilled at following informational threads through different sources will succeed more often than those spoon fed information.

Bernstein finally confronts Carr’s argument in this way:

“Carr’s thesis almost automatically formulates its own counterargument: Life in the developed world increasingly demands non-rote, nonlinear thought. Shouldn’t learning to navigate hypertext skilfully enhance the ability to make rapid connections? Shouldn’t such abilities encourage the sort of nonlinear creative processing demanded by the modern work environment, and make us smarter, more productive, and ultimately more autonomous and fulfilled…..

If the Web really is making American stupid, then shouldn’t citizens of more densely wired nations, such as Estonia, Finland and Korea, be hit even harder? The question answers itself.”

In some respects Carr and Greenfield are using the “low hanging fruit” of technological fear to advance their propositions. Krotoski’s rejection of those views is, on the other hand, a little too absolute and in my view the answer lies somewhere in between. The issue is a little more nuanced than whether or not the Internet is dumbing us down or whether or not there is any evidence of that.

My argument is that the impact of the internet lies in the way in which it redefines the use of information and the way we access it, process it, use it, respond to it and our expectations of it and its availability.

This may not seem to be as significant as Carr’s rewiring or Greenfields neuroplasticity but it is, in my view, just as important. Our decision making is based upon information.

Although some of our activity could be termed responses to stimuli, or indeed it might be instinctive, most of the stimuli to which we respond can in fact be defined as information – if not all of it.

The information that we obtain when crossing the road comes from our senses and sight and hearing but in many other of our activities we require information upon we which may deliberate and to which we respond in making decision about what we are going to do, buy and so on.

And paradigmatically different ways of information acquisition are going to change the way in which we use and respond to information. There are other changes that are taking place that arise from some of the fundamental qualities that underline new digital communications technologies – and all communication technologies have these particular properties or qualities underlying them and which attach to them; from the printing press through to the wireless through to the radio through to television and into the digital paradigm. It is just that digital systems are so fundamentally different in the way in which they operate and in their pervasive nature that they usher in a new paradigm.

After the publication of Carr's essay, a developing view unfolded in the media as sociological and neurological studies surfaced that were relevant to determining the cognitive impact of regular Internet usage. Challenges to Carr's argument were made frequently.

As the two most outspoken detractors of electronic media, Carr and Birkerts were both appealed to by Kevin Kelly to each formulate a more precise definition of the faults they perceived regarding electronic media so that their beliefs could be scientifically verified.

While Carr firmly believed that his scepticism about the Internet's benefits to cognition was warranted, he cautioned in both his essay and his book The Big Switch that long-term psychological and neurological studies were required to definitively ascertain how cognition develops under the influence of the Internet.

There have been other criticisms arguing that Carr's perspective is overly pessimistic and fails to acknowledge the positive aspects of the internet and digital technologies. Critics suggest that his focus on the negative impacts may overshadow the benefits of connectivity and access to information.

Furthermore, although Carr’s argument appears compelling about the internet's impact on our cognitive abilities, some readers may find the book's scope to be somewhat narrow. The discussion primarily revolves around reading and attention, with less emphasis on other potential effects of the internet.

Superbloom

In 2025 Nicholas Carr published another book. This one is entitled Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.

The title refers to a rare “super bloom” of California poppies in typically arid soil, an episode that drew selfie-taking influencers, flower-trampling crowds and a frenzied backlash. Left to our own devices, so to speak, we can get vain, careless, resentful and cruel.

This book is an extension of Carr’s concerns about technology and takes us from the Google era to the social media era. His approach has been described by Jennifer Szalai writing in the New York Times as a jeremiad, a term with which I am inclined to agree and which I shall develop further.

Carr argues that in some respects the desire that we have to seek out new information – curiosity, if you will - is being exploited for inhuman ends. We are primed to seek out new information; yet our relentless curiosity makes us ill equipped for the infinite scroll of the information age, which we indulge in to our detriment.

Carr comments

“Social media is not successful because it goes against our instincts and desires,” It’s successful because it gives us what we want.”

He lays some of the blame with tech companies, which ply us with the digital equivalent of junk food. They engineer how we relate to one another online by selecting for content that whips up strong emotions to draw us “deeper into the feed.”

Blaming technology is an easy out. Regulation can only do so much. What is happening with social media is communication and more communication does not necessarily lead to more understanding.

Our antisocial proclivities were once kept in check by more effortful methods of reaching out to one another. “The deliberate, reflective practice” of composing a handwritten letter, Carr laments, has been superseded by the “short, snappy” idiom of texting.

By removing barriers to communication, social media has enabled us to let loose our worst instincts and transmit to a huge audience whatever thoughtlet comes to mind.

Carr pointed to the negative impact of the Internet on our ability to read emotions:

“Sherry Turkle, an MIT social psychologist who has been studying how people communicate through computers for decades, has described social media as an “anti-empathy machine.” She argues that we suppress our capacity for empathy by “putting ourselves in environments where we’re not looking at each other in the eye, not sticking with the other person long enough or hard enough to follow what they’re feeling.

Over the long run a dependency on online communication can reduce people’s ability to feel empathy in general, making them less empathetic even when they’re not on their phone or computer. Even their self-awareness can be blunted. “Research shows that those who use social media the most have difficulty reading human emotions, including their own.”

Carr points out that several studies show that the more time we spend online, the more likely we are to feel anxious, lonely, and depressed.

As a result, our information processing skills become shallower as well. We get distracted constantly, skimming through text, searching for the next reward in an endless feed. We rely on intuitive mental shortcuts (heuristics) to make sense of our changing environment. But as a result, we become set in how we consume information, no longer relying on solitude for gradual answers. Repeated exposure to the efficiency of the Internet only makes us want to speed up our information-processing abilities, which in turn, leaves us impulsive and irrational.

A further issue is that we often doubt what is true when we see it online and when we can no longer trust what is objectively true anymore, it is beneficial for authoritarian regimes and harmful for a functioning democracy.

“As truth decays, so too will trust. That would have profound political implications. A world of doubt and uncertainty is good for autocrats and bad for democracy, Chesney and Citron argue. “Authoritarian regimes and leaders with authoritarian tendencies benefit when objective truths lose their power.” In George Orwell’s 1984, the functionaries in Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth spend their days rewriting historical records, discarding inconvenient old facts and making up new ones. When the truth gets hazy, tyrants get to define what’s true.”

It is therefore argued that social media is an effective tool for those in power. They can enforce their ideologies through what they select for us to see and not see. We are constantly exposed to their filtered versions of reality, but not reality itself. And when authoritarian regimes take control, we are especially vulnerable to their lies, misinformation, censorship, and surveillance.

Carr concludes that because it has been so easy for us to gorge on information, we have neglected the slow joy of finding things out in solitude. Instead of grappling with our restlessness, boredom, and angst we have let ourselves become distracted by shallow entertainment. But in doing so, we may have lost an important part of what makes us human.

Are these gloomy forecasts about the modern information ecosystem just reiterations of old fears? Plato lamented that writing would erode our minds; the printing press was denounced as a diabolical device. Newspapers were accused of peddling filth and debasing public morality; television was going to rot our minds.

The temptation to blame every current sociopolitical failing on communications technologies should be resisted and just occasionally Carr’s argument goes beyond the evidence.

He accepts the contested claim that false stories spread faster than true ones and cites social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s disputed (if plausible) argument that social media can be identified as a cause and not just a correlate of depression and anxiety in young people.

Carr’s claim that “open-ended, contemplative ways of thinking—the philosophical, the ruminative, the introspective—have been marginalized” warrants further interrogation.

And when he quotes media scholar Ian Bogost as saying that social media offer only a “sociopathic rendition of human sociality,” one has to ask: Is that really all it does? Do we not initiate and cultivate friendships this way? Didn’t communication technologies help relieve the isolation of pandemic lockdown?

Additionally, Superbloom is heavily predicated on the American experience. For many people globally, hyperreality offers no escape from hardship, drudgery, peril, and war.

Carr doesn’t have a very positive or hopeful view of modern communications technologies. And although he tries to differentiate his responses to the Digital Paradigm from early resistance to the Print Paradigm his is essentially a similarly negativist view. He is seeking something that has been overtaken by events. In the same way that Birkerts laments the decline of deep reading, Carr places many social ills to digital communications and social media.

What he would like us to do – and it is definitely a rear-view mirror approach – is to reclaim an analogue life. But those days are gone. Carr may mourn their passing but past they are.

His first book was an example of Internet negativism. The target was Google and the impact that online activity might have on cognition. The second book takes the matter further and suggests that although we have at our disposal a revolutionary communications system that has enabled a variety of means of staying in touch with smaller and larger groups this has had a negative effect and is driving a change in social activity.

Superbloom is an example of techno-pessimism – a fear that technology now controls us in a way that we cannot understand or a negative view of the benefits of technology especially within the sphere of social media.

Social media has made the trivialization of discourse more visible.

Many aspects of communication are trivial and always have been. The means of expression of a staccato nature, grammatically suspect, repetitive and at times incomprehensible to any but the participants have been with us before the Internet but now we see this because we have signed in to X or Bluesky or Facebook.

Should we feel pessimistic about this because we can now see what was once hidden?

I suggested earlier that Carr’s books and article on these subjects are a jeremiad – a long, mournful complaint, lamentation or list of woes and there is no doubt that is a reasonable conclusion to draw from his books.

Part of Carr’s problem is that he fails to recognize that by the time we recognize the effects of technological change – both the good and the bad – it is too late to do anything about it.

This is because technology drives behavioural change and at the same time as the benefits of new technologies are understood the downsides also become apparent. This is an example of McLuhan’s comment to which I have referred about the way in which we may make our tools but then our tools enable us to change behaviours.

Often these behaviours will represent a dramatic change from the way things were done in the past. Other changes will be slower and more incremental, unrecognized until the behavioural change becomes obvious usually as a result of a retrospective view, by which time it may be too late to change, if indeed anyone might want to change.

So Carr’s jeremiad is for what is lost or what has changed. By his value system that may be something to be mourned or lamented. What he fails to recognize is that developing from these changed behaviours and changed attitudes will be a series of developing, modified or changed values that underpin the behaviours and ultimately validate them.

This is not some form of technological determinism although there are elements of that present as there are in any technology that influences behaviour. But the causative link between the technology and the behaviour may not be immediately apparent. Indeed, it may turn out to be an example of an unintended or unforeseen consequence.

In conclusion, let me refer to another Atlantic article from the February 2025 issue. The article is entitled “The Anti-Social Century.”

The article gives an example of a diner that, pre-Covid, was bustling with people but now business is booming but with the sale of take-away food. The space once reserved for that most garrulous social encounter, the bar hangout, had been reconfigured into a silent depot for customers to grab food to eat at home.

Video entertainment has changed. Whereas going to the cinema – a collective experience, something enjoyed with friends and in the company of strangers – occurred several times a month, now the typical American buys three cinema tickets a year and watches 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis. In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.

And much of this solitude is self-imposed. The author suggests that the smartphone has fueled and accelerated this change in socialization – the author describes it as an anti-social streak but that implies that solitude is a negative aspect of existence and one that does not conform with “accepted values”

The author picks up on Carr’s observations in Superbloom.

“Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary. “Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd,” Nicholas Carr, the author of the new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, told me. “Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime.” Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.

If Carr is right, modern technology’s always-open window to the outside world makes recharging much harder, leaving many people chronically depleted, a walking battery that is always stuck in the red zone. In a healthy world, people who spend lots of time alone would feel that ancient biological cue: I’m alone and sad; I should make some plans. But we live in a sideways world, where easy home entertainment, oversharing online, and stunted social skills spark a strangely popular response: I’m alone, anxious, and exhausted; thank God my plans were canceled.”

I would have expected after the identification of so many woes allegedly caused by the Internet and social media that Carr would be advocating some sort of State interference in the form of regulation. In that respect Carr is both alarmist and pessimist but unable to identify a solution to what he sees as a problem. This leaves the reader with a sense that all is not well but there is not a lot we can do about it.

To be sure, some States have. The Peoples Republic of China has a sophisticated State-controlled censorship and content control system. Other countries, New Zealand among them, have some sort of system to monitor objectionable or harmful material that is available online. But that is not the problem that Carr has identified.

Would his concerns have been met by the wide-ranging but thankfully discontinued process that was embarked upon by the Department of Internal Affairs under the name “Safer Online Service and Media Platforms”. That proposed a wide-ranging regulatory model but once again the issue of cognitive development or behavioural modification was not a target.

But an interesting turn-around takes us back to Sven Birkerts and the decline of deep reading and the turn-around of American bookstore chain Barnes and Noble

“The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time.

Independent bookstores are booming—the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009—and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings.

More districts and states are banning smartphones in schools, a national experiment that could, optimistically, improve children’s focus and their physical-world relationships.

In the past few years, board-game cafés have flowered across the country, and their business is expected to nearly double by 2030. These cafés buck an 80-year trend. Instead of turning a previously social form of entertainment into a private one, they turn a living-room pastime into a destination activity.

As sweeping as the social revolution I’ve described might seem, it’s built from the ground up by institutions and decisions that are profoundly within our control: as humble as a café, as small as a new phone locker at school.”

It may well be that our digital future will blend the old with the new. Bookstores will become niche gathering places. Socialisation will continue – differently from before.

And the Digital Paradigm will still be with us.