The Shallows

by Nicholas Carr

  Next, the Web began to take over the work of our traditional sound-processing equipment—radios and phonographs and tape decks. The earliest sounds to be heard online were spoken words, but soon snippets of music, and then entire songs and even symphonies, were streaming through sites, at ever-higher levels of fidelity. The network’s ability to handle audio streams was aided by the development of software algorithms, such as the one used to produce MP3 files, that erase from music and other recordings sounds that are hard for the human ear to hear. The algorithms allowed sound files to be compressed to much smaller sizes with only slight sacrifices in quality. Telephone calls also began to be routed over the fiber-optic cables of the Internet, bypassing traditional phone lines.

  Finally, video came online, as the Net subsumed the technologies of cinema and television. Because the transmission and display of moving pictures place great demands on computers and networks, the first online videos played in tiny windows inside browsers. The pictures would often stutter or drop out, and they were usually out of sync with their soundtracks. But here, too, gains came swiftly. Within just a few years, elaborate three-dimensional games were being played online, and companies like Netflix and Apple were sending high-definition movies and TV shows over the network and onto screens in customers’ homes. Even the long-promised “picture phone” is finally becoming a reality, as webcams become a regular feature of computers and Net-connected televisions, and popular Internet telephone services like Skype incorporate video transmissions.

  THE NET DIFFERS from most of the mass media it replaces in an obvious and very important way: it’s bidirectional. We can send messages through the network as well as receive them. That’s made the system all the more useful. The ability to exchange information online, to upload as well as download, has turned the Net into a thoroughfare for business and commerce. With a few clicks, people can search virtual catalogues, place orders, track shipments, and update information in corporate databases. But the Net doesn’t just connect us with businesses; it connects us with one another. It’s a personal broadcasting medium as well as a commercial one. Millions of people use it to distribute their own digital creations, in the form of blogs, videos, photos, songs, and podcasts, as well as to critique, edit, or otherwise modify the creations of others. The vast, volunteer-written encyclopedia Wikipedia, the largely amateur-produced YouTube video service, the massive Flickr photo repository, the sprawling Huffington Post blog compendium—all of these popular media services were unimaginable before the Web came along. The interactivity of the medium has also turned it into the world’s meetinghouse, where people gather to chat, gossip, argue, show off, and flirt on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and all sorts of other social (and sometimes antisocial) networks.

  As the uses of the Internet have proliferated, the time we devote to the medium has grown apace, even as speedier connections have allowed us to do more during every minute we’re logged on. By 2009, adults in North America were spending an average of twelve hours online a week, double the average in 2005.7 If you consider only those adults with Internet access, online hours jump considerably, to more than seventeen a week. For younger adults, the figure is higher still, with people in their twenties spending more than nineteen hours a week online.8 American children between the ages of two and eleven were using the Net about eleven hours a week in 2009, an increase of more than sixty percent since 2004.9 The typical European adult was online nearly eight hours a week in 2009, up about thirty percent since 2005. Europeans in their twenties were online about twelve hours a week on average.10 A 2008 international survey of 27,500 adults between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five found that people are spending thirty percent of their leisure time online, with the Chinese being the most intensive surfers, devoting forty-four percent of their off-work hours to the Net.11

  These figures don’t include the time people spend using their mobile phones and other handheld computers to exchange text messages, which also continues to increase rapidly. Text messaging now represents one of the most common uses of computers, particularly for the young. By the beginning of 2009, the average American cell phone user was sending or receiving nearly 400 texts a month, more than a fourfold increase from 2006. The average American teen was sending or receiving a mind-boggling 2,272 texts a month.12 Worldwide, well over two trillion text messages zip between mobile phones every year, far outstripping the number of voice calls.13 Thanks to our ever-present messaging systems and devices, we “never really have to disconnect,” says Danah Boyd, a social scientist who works for Microsoft.14

  It’s often assumed that the time we devote to the Net comes out of the time we would otherwise spend watching TV. But statistics suggest otherwise. Most studies of media activity indicate that as Net use has gone up, television viewing has either held steady or increased. The Nielsen Company’s long-running media-tracking survey reveals that the time Americans devote to TV viewing has been going up throughout the Web era. The hours we spend in front of the tube rose another two percent between 2008 and 2009, reaching 153 hours a month, the highest level since Nielsen began collecting data in the 1950s (and that doesn’t include the time people spend watching TV shows on their computers).15 In Europe as well, people continue to watch television as much as they ever have. The average European viewed more than a dozen hours of TV a week in 2009, nearly an hour more than in 2004.16

  A 2006 study by Jupiter Research revealed “a huge overlap” between TV viewing and Web surfing, with forty-two percent of the most avid TV fans (those watching thirty-five or more hours of programming a week) also being among the most intensive users of the Net (those spending thirty or more hours online a week).17 The growth in our online time has, in other words, expanded the total amount of time we spend in front of screens. According to an extensive 2009 study conducted by Ball State University’s Center for Media Design, most Americans, no matter what their age, spend at least eight and a half hours a day looking at a television, a computer monitor, or the screen of their mobile phone. Frequently, they use two or even all three of the devices simultaneously.18

  What does seem to be decreasing as Net use grows is the time we spend reading print publications—particularly newspapers and magazines, but also books. Of the four major categories of personal media, print is now the least used, lagging well behind television, computers, and radio. By 2008, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the time that the average American over the age of fourteen devoted to reading printed works had fallen to 143 minutes a week, a drop of eleven percent since 2004. Young adults between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, who are among the most avid Net users, were reading printed works for a total of just forty-nine minutes a week in 2008, down a precipitous twenty-nine percent from 2004.19 In a small but telling 2008 study conducted for Adweek magazine, four typical Americans—a barber, a chemist, an elementary school principal, and a real estate agent—were shadowed during the course of a day to document their media usage. The people displayed very different habits, but they shared one thing in common, according to the magazine: “None of the four cracked open any print media during their observed hours.”20 Because of the ubiquity of text on the Net and our phones, we’re almost certainly reading more words today than we did twenty years ago, but we’re devoting much less time to reading words printed on paper.

  The Internet, like the personal computer before it, has proven to be so useful in so many ways that we’ve welcomed every expansion of its scope. Rarely have we paused to ponder, much less question, the media revolution that has been playing out all around us, in our homes, our workplaces, our schools. Until the Net arrived, the history of media had been a tale of fragmentation. Different technologies progressed down different paths, leading to a proliferation of special-purpose tools. Books and newspapers could present text and images, but they couldn’t handle sounds or moving pictures. Visual media like cinema and TV were unsuited to the display of text, except in the smallest of quantities. Radios, telephones, phonog
raphs, and tape players were limited to transmitting sounds. If you wanted to add up numbers, you used a calculator. If you wanted to look up facts, you consulted a set of encyclopedias or a World Almanac. The production end of the business was every bit as fragmented as the consumption end. If a company wanted to sell words, it printed them on paper. If it wanted to sell movies, it wound them onto spools of film. If it wanted to sell songs, it pressed them onto vinyl records or recorded them onto magnetic tape. If it wanted to distribute TV shows and commercials, it shot them through the air from a big antenna or sent them down thick black coaxial cables.

  Once information is digitized, the boundaries between media dissolve. We replace our special-purpose tools with an all-purpose tool. And because the economics of digital production and distribution are almost always superior to what came before—the cost of creating electronic products and transmitting them through the Net is a small fraction of the cost of manufacturing physical goods and shipping them through warehouses and into stores—the shift happens very quickly, following capitalism’s inexorable logic. Today, nearly all media companies distribute digital versions of their products through the Net, and the growth in the consumption of media goods is taking place almost entirely online.

  That doesn’t mean that traditional forms of media have disappeared. We still buy books and subscribe to magazines. We still go to the movies and listen to the radio. Some of us still buy music on CDs and movies on DVDs. A few of us will even pick up a newspaper now and then. When old technologies are supplanted by new ones, the old technologies often continue to be used for a long time, sometimes indefinitely. Decades after the invention of movable type, many books were still being handwritten by scribes or printed from woodblocks—and some of the most beautiful books continue to be produced in those ways today. Quite a few people still listen to vinyl records, use film cameras to take photographs, and look up phone numbers in the printed Yellow Pages. But the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. They become progress’s dead ends. It’s the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people’s behavior and shape their perceptions. That’s why the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDs. It lies in digital files shot through our universal medium at the speed of light.

  “A NEW MEDIUM is never an addition to an old one,” wrote McLuhan in Understanding Media, “nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.”21 His observation rings particularly true today. Traditional media, even electronic ones, are being refashioned and repositioned as they go through the shift to online distribution. When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium’s physical form; it injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.

  A page of online text viewed through a computer screen may seem similar to a page of printed text. But scrolling or clicking through a Web document involves physical actions and sensory stimuli very different from those involved in holding and turning the pages of a book or a magazine. Research has shown that the cognitive act of reading draws not just on our sense of sight but also on our sense of touch. It’s tactile as well as visual. “All reading,” writes Anne Mangen, a Norwegian literary studies professor, is “multi-sensory.” There’s “a crucial link” between “the sensory-motor experience of the materiality” of a written work and “the cognitive processing of the text content.” 22 The shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it.

  Hyperlinks also alter our experience of media. Links are in one sense a variation on the textual allusions, citations, and footnotes that have long been common elements of documents. But their effect on us as we read is not at all the same. Links don’t just point us to related or supplemental works; they propel us toward them. They encourage us to dip in and out of a series of texts rather than devote sustained attention to any one of them. Hyperlinks are designed to grab our attention. Their value as navigational tools is inextricable from the distraction they cause.

  The searchability of online works also represents a variation on older navigational aids such as tables of contents, indexes, and concordances. But here, too, the effects are different. As with links, the ease and ready availability of searching make it much simpler to jump between digital documents than it ever was to jump between printed ones. Our attachment to any one text becomes more tenuous, more provisional. Searches also lead to the fragmentation of online works. A search engine often draws our attention to a particular snippet of text, a few words or sentences that have strong relevance to whatever we’re searching for at the moment, while providing little incentive for taking in the work as a whole. We don’t see the forest when we search the Web. We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves. As companies like Google and Microsoft perfect search engines for video and audio content, more products are undergoing the fragmentation that already characterizes written works.

  By combining many different kinds of information on a single screen, the multimedia Net further fragments content and disrupts our concentration. A single Web page may contain a few chunks of text, a video or audio stream, a set of navigational tools, various advertisements, and several small software applications, or “widgets,” running in their own windows. We all know how distracting this cacophony of stimuli can be. We joke about it all the time. A new e-mail message announces its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. A few seconds later, our RSS reader tells us that one of our favorite bloggers has uploaded a new post. A moment after that, our mobile phone plays the ringtone that signals an incoming text message. Simultaneously, a Facebook or Twitter alert blinks on-screen. In addition to everything flowing through the network, we also have immediate access to all the other software programs running on our computers—they, too, compete for a piece of our mind. Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an “ecosystem of interruption technologies,” as the blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms it.23

  Interactivity, hyperlinking, searchability, multimedia—all these qualities of the Net bring attractive benefits. Along with the unprecedented volume of information available online, they’re the main reasons that most of us are drawn to using the Net so much. We like to be able to switch between reading and listening and watching without having to get up and turn on another appliance or dig through a pile of magazines or disks. We like to be able to find and be transported instantly to relevant data—without having to sort through lots of extraneous stuff. We like to be in touch with friends, family members, and colleagues. We like to feel connected—and we hate to feel disconnected. The Internet doesn’t change our intellectual habits against our will. But change them it does.

  Our use of the Net will only grow, and its impact on us will only strengthen, as it becomes ever more present in our lives. Like the clock and the book before it, the computer continues to get smaller and cheaper as technology advances. Inexpensive laptops gave us the ability to take the Internet with us when we left our office or our home. But the laptop was itself a cumbersome device, and connecting one to the Internet was not always easy. The introduction of the tiny netbook and the even tinier smartphone solves those problems. Powerful pocket-sized computers like the Apple iPhone, the Motorola Droid, and the Google Nexus One come bundled with Internet access. Along with the incorporation of Internet services into everything from car dashboards to televisions to the cabins of airplanes, these small devices promise to more deeply integrate the Web into our everyday activities, making our universal medium all th
e more universal.

  As the Net expands, other media contract. By changing the economics of production and distribution, the Net has cut into the profitability of many news, information, and entertainment businesses, particularly those that have traditionally sold physical products. Sales of music CDs have fallen steadily over the last decade, dropping twenty percent in 2008 alone.24 Sales of movie DVDs, a major recent source of profits for Hollywood studios, are also now in decline, falling six percent during 2008 and then plunging another fourteen percent during the first half of 2009.25 Unit sales of greeting cards and postcards are dropping.26 The volume of mail sent through the U.S. Postal Service declined at its fastest pace ever during 2009.27 Universities are discontinuing the printed editions of scholarly monographs and journals and moving to strictly electronic distribution.28 Public schools are pushing students to use online reference materials in place of what California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refers to as “antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks.”29 Everywhere you look, you see signs of the Net’s growing hegemony over the packaging and flow of information.

  Nowhere have the effects been so unsettling as in the newspaper industry, which faces particularly severe financial challenges as readers and advertisers embrace the Net as their medium of choice. The decline in Americans’ newspaper reading began decades ago, when radio and TV began consuming more of peoples’ leisure time, but the Internet has accelerated the trend. Between 2008 and 2009, newspaper circulation dropped more than seven percent, while visits to newspaper Web sites grew by more than ten percent.30 One of America’s oldest dailies, the Christian Science Monitor, announced in early 2009 that after a hundred years it was stopping its presses. The Web would become its main channel for distributing news. The move, said the paper’s publisher, Jonathan Wells, was a harbinger of what lay in store for other newspapers. “Changes in the industry—changes in the concept of news and the economics underlying the industry—hit the Monitor first,” he explained.31