The Shallows

by Nicholas Carr

  He was soon proved correct. Within months, Colorado’s oldest newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, had gone out of business; the Seattle Post-Intelligencer had abandoned its print edition and fired most of its staff; the Washington Post had shut down all its U.S. bureaus and let more than a hundred journalists go; and the owners of more than thirty other U.S. newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Minneapolis Star Tribune, had filed for bankruptcy. Tim Brooks, the managing director of Guardian News and Media, which publishes The Guardian and The Independent in Britain, announced that all his company’s future investments would go into multimedia digital products, mainly delivered through its Web sites. “The days when you can trade in just words are gone,” he told an industry conference.32

  AS PEOPLE’S MINDS become attuned to the crazy quilt of Web content, media companies have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Many producers are chopping up their products to fit the shorter attention spans of online consumers, as well as to raise their profiles on search engines. Snippets of TV shows and movies are distributed through YouTube, Hulu, and other video services. Excerpts of radio programs are offered as podcasts or streams. Individual magazine and newspaper articles circulate in isolation. Pages of books are displayed through Amazon.com and Google Book Search. Music albums are split apart, their songs sold through iTunes or streamed through Spotify. Even the songs themselves are broken into pieces, with their riffs and hooks packaged as ringtones for cell phones or embedded in video games. There’s much to be said for what economists call the “unbundling” of content. It provides people with more choices and frees them from unwanted purchases. But it also illustrates and reinforces the changing patterns of media consumption promoted by the Web. As the economist Tyler Cowen says, “When access [to information] is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty.”33

  The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edge of a computer screen. Media companies are reshaping their traditional products, even the physical ones, to more closely resemble what people experience when they’re online. If, in the early days of the Web, the design of online publications was inspired by print publications (as the design of Gutenberg’s Bible was inspired by scribal books), today the inspiration tends to go in the opposite direction. Many magazines have tweaked their layouts to mimic or at least echo the look and feel of Web sites. They’ve shortened their articles, introduced capsule summaries, and crowded their pages with easy-to-browse blurbs and captions. Rolling Stone, once known for publishing sprawling, adventurous features by writers like Hunter S. Thompson, now eschews such works, offering readers a jumble of short articles and reviews. There was “no Internet,” publisher Jann Wenner explains, “back when Rolling Stone was publishing these seven-thousand-word stories.” Most popular magazines have come to be “filled with color, oversized headlines, graphics, photos, and pull quotes,” writes Michael Scherer in the Columbia Journalism Review. “The gray text page, once a magazine staple, has been all but banished.”34

  The design of newspapers is also changing. Many papers, including industry stalwarts like the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, have over the last few years moved to trim the length of their articles and introduce more summaries and navigational aids to make the scanning of their contents easier. An editor at the Times of London attributes such format changes to the newspaper industry’s adaptation to “an Internet age, a headline age.”35 In March of 2008, the New York Times announced it would begin devoting three pages of every edition to paragraph-long article abstracts and other brief items. Its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would allow harried readers to get a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles.36

  Such copycat strategies haven’t been particularly successful in stanching the flow of readers from print to online publications. After a year, during which its circulation continued to decline, the New York Times quietly abandoned much of its redesign, restricting article summaries to a single page in most editions. A few magazines, realizing that competing with the Web on its own terms is a losing proposition, have reversed their strategies. They’ve gone back to simpler, less cluttered designs and longer articles. Newsweek over-hauled its pages in 2009, placing a greater emphasis on essays and professional photographs and adopting a heavier, more expensive paper stock. The price that publications pay for going against the conventions of the Web is a further whittling of their readership. When Newsweek unveiled its new design, it also announced it was slashing the circulation it guaranteed its advertisers from 2.6 million to 1.5 million.37

  Like their print counterparts, most TV shows and movies are also trying to become more Web-like. Television networks have added text “crawls” and “flippers” to their screens and routinely run infographics and pop-up ads during their programs. Some newer shows, such as NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, have been explicitly designed to cater as much to Net surfers as TV viewers, with an emphasis on brief segments that lend themselves to distribution as YouTube clips. Cable and satellite companies offer theme channels that enable viewers to watch several programs simultaneously, using their remote control as a kind of mouse to click between audio tracks. Web content is also beginning to be offered directly through TVs, as leading television manufacturers like Sony and Samsung redesign their sets to seamlessly combine Internet programming with traditional broadcasts. Movie studios have begun incorporating social-networking features into the disks they sell. With the Blu-ray version of Disney’s Snow White, viewers can chat with one another through the Net while watching the seven dwarves march off to work. The disk of Watchmen automatically syncs with Facebook accounts, letting viewers exchange “live commentary” on the film with their “friends.”38 Craig Kornblau, the president of Universal Studios Home Entertainment, says the studio plans to introduce more such features, with the goal of turning the viewing of movies into “interactive experiences.”39

  The Net has begun to alter the way we experience actual performances as well as the recordings of those performances. When we carry a powerful mobile computer into a theater or other venue, we carry, as well, all the communication and social-networking tools available on the Web. It long ago became common for concertgoers to record and broadcast snippets of shows to friends through the cameras in their cell phones. Now, mobile computers are beginning to be deliberately incorporated into performances as a way to appeal to a new generation of Net-saturated patrons. During a 2009 performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony at Wolf Trap in Virginia, the National Symphony Orchestra sent out a stream of Twitter tweets, written by conductor Emil de Cou, explaining some of Beethoven’s musical references.40 The New York Philharmonic and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra have begun encouraging audience members to use their phones to vote, via text messaging, for the evening’s encore. “It was less passive than just sitting there and listening to music,” commented an attendee after a recent Philharmonic performance.41 A growing number of American churches are encouraging parishioners to bring laptops and smartphones to services in order to exchange inspirational messages through Twitter and other microblogging services.42 Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, sees the incorporation of social networking into theatrical and other events as an exciting new business opportunity for Internet firms. “The most obvious use of Twitter,” he says, can be seen in situations where “everybody is watching a play and are busy talking about the play while the play is under way.”43 Even the experiences we have in the real world are coming to be mediated by networked computers.

  A particularly striking illustration of how the Net is reshaping our expectations about media can be seen in any library. Although we don’t tend to think of libraries as media technologies, they are. The public library is, in fact, one of the most important and influential informational media ever created—and one that proliferated only after the arrival of sile
nt reading and movable-type printing. A community’s attitudes and preferences toward information take concrete shape in its library’s design and services. Until recently, the public library was an oasis of bookish tranquility where people searched through shelves of neatly arranged volumes or sat in carrels and read quietly. Today’s library is very different. Internet access is rapidly becoming its most popular service. According to recent surveys by the American Library Association, ninety-nine percent of U.S. public library branches provide Internet access, and the average branch has eleven public computers. More than three-quarters of branches also offer Wi-fi networks for their patrons’ use.44 The predominant sound in the modern library is the tapping of keys, not the turning of pages.

  The architecture of one of the newest branches of the venerable New York Public Library, the Bronx Library Center, testifies to the library’s changing role. Writing in the journal Strategy & Business, three management consultants describe the building’s layout: “On the library’s four main floors, the stacks of books have been placed at each end, leaving ample space in the middle for tables that have computers on them, many with broadband access to the Internet. The people using the computers are young and aren’t necessarily using them for academic purposes—here is one doing a Google search on Hannah Montana pictures, there is one updating his Facebook page, and over there a few children are playing video games, including The Fight for Glorton. Librarians answer questions and organize online gaming tournaments, and none of them are shushing anyone.”45 The consultants point to the Bronx branch as an example of how forward-looking libraries are retaining their “relevance” by “launching new digital initiatives to meet users’ needs.” The library’s layout provides, as well, a powerful symbol of our new media landscape: at the center stands the screen of the Internet-connected computer; the printed word has been pushed to the margins.

  The Very Image Of A Book

  And what of the book itself? Of all popular media, it’s probably the one that has been most resistant to the Net’s influence. Book publishers have suffered some losses of business as reading has shifted from the printed page to the screen, but the form of the book itself hasn’t changed much. A long sequence of printed pages assembled between a pair of stiff covers has proven to be a remarkably robust technology, remaining useful and popular for more than half a millennium.

  It’s not hard to see why books have been slow to make the leap into the digital age. There’s not a whole lot of difference between a computer monitor and a television screen, and the sounds coming from speakers hit your ears in pretty much the same way whether they’re being transmitted through a computer or a radio. But as a device for reading, the book retains some compelling advantages over the computer. You can take a book to the beach without worrying about sand getting in its works. You can take it to bed without being nervous about it falling to the floor should you nod off. You can spill coffee on it. You can sit on it. You can put it down on a table, open to the page you’re reading, and when you pick it up a few days later it will still be exactly as you left it. You never have to be concerned about plugging a book into an outlet or having its battery die.

  The experience of reading tends to be better with a book too. Words stamped on a page in black ink are easier to read than words formed of pixels on a backlit screen. You can read a dozen or a hundred printed pages without suffering the eye fatigue that often results from even a brief stretch of online reading. Navigating a book is simpler and, as software programmers say, more intuitive. You can flip through real pages much more quickly and flexibly than you can through virtual pages. And you can write notes in a book’s margins or highlight passages that move or inspire you. You can even get a book’s author to sign its title page. When you’re finished with a book, you can use it to fill an empty space on your bookshelf—or lend it to a friend.

  Despite years of hype about electronic books, most people haven’t shown much interest in them. Investing a few hundred dollars in a specialized “digital reader” has seemed silly, given the ease and pleasure of buying and reading old-fashioned books. But books will not remain exempt from the digital media revolution. The economic advantages of digital production and distribution—no big purchases of ink and paper, no printer bills, no loading of heavy boxes onto trucks, no returns of unsold copies—are every bit as compelling for book publishers and distributors as for other media companies. And the lower costs translate into lower prices. It’s not unusual for e-books to be sold for half the price of print editions, thanks in part to subsidies from device manufacturers. The sharp discounts provide a strong incentive for people to make the switch from paper to pixels.

  Digital readers have also improved greatly in recent years. The advantages of traditional books are not quite as clear-cut as they used to be. Thanks to high-resolution screens made of materials like Vizplex, a charged-particle film developed by the Massachusetts company E Ink, the clarity of digital text now almost rivals that of printed text. The latest readers don’t require backlighting, allowing them to be used in direct sunlight and reducing eye strain considerably. The functions of the readers have also improved, making it much easier to click through pages, add bookmarks, highlight text, and even scribble marginal notes. People with weak eyes can increase the size of the type in e-books—something they can’t do with printed books. And as computer memory prices have gone down, the capacity of the readers has gone up. You can now load them with hundreds of books. Just as an iPod can hold the entire contents of an average person’s music collection, so an e-book reader can now hold an entire personal library.

  Although sales of e-books still represent a tiny fraction of overall book sales, they have been increasing at a much faster pace than sales of physical books. Amazon.com reported in early 2009 that for the 275,000 books it sells in both traditional and digital form, the e-book versions account for thirty-five percent of total sales, up sharply from less than ten percent just a year earlier. Long stagnant, sales of digital readers are now booming, rising from about one million units in 2008 to an estimated twelve million in 2010.1 As Brad Stone and Motoko Rich of the New York Times recently reported, “the e-book has started to take hold.”2

  ONE OF THE more popular of the new digital readers is Amazon’s own Kindle. Introduced with great fanfare in 2007, the gadget incorporates all the latest screen technology and reading functions and includes a full keypad. But it has another feature that greatly increases its attractiveness. The Kindle has a built-in, always-available wireless connection to the Internet. The cost of the connection is rolled into the price of the Kindle, so there’s no additional subscription fee involved. The connection allows you, not surprisingly, to shop for books at the Amazon store and immediately download the ones you buy. But it lets you do much more than that. You can read digital newspapers and magazines, scan blogs, perform Google searches, listen to MP3s, and, through a specially made browser, surf other Web sites. The Kindle’s most radical feature, at least when it comes to thinking about what’s in store for books, is its incorporation of links into the text it displays. The Kindle turns the words of books into hypertext. You can click on a word or a phrase and be taken to a related dictionary entry, Wikipedia article, or list of Google search results.

  The Kindle points to the future of digital readers. Its features, and even its software, are being incorporated into iPhones and PCs, transforming the reader from a specialized and expensive device to just another cheap application running in Turing’s universal machine. The Kindle also, if less happily, points to the future of books. In a 2009 Newsweek article, the journalist and editor Jacob Weisberg, once a skeptic about electronic books, praised the Kindle as “a machine that marks a cultural revolution” in which “reading and printing are getting separated.” What the Kindle tells us, Weisberg went on, is “that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.”3 Charles McGrath, onetime editor of the New York Ti
mes Book Review, has also become a Kindle believer, calling “the seductive white gizmo” a “precursor” of what’s to come for books and reading. “It’s surprising how easily you succumb to convenience,” he says, “and how little you miss, once they’re gone, all the niceties of typography and design that you used to value so much.” While he doesn’t think that printed books are going to disappear anytime soon, he does sense that “in the future we will keep them around as fond relics, reminders of what reading used to be like.” 4

  What would that mean for how we read what we used to read in books? The Wall Street Journal’s L. Gordon Crovitz has suggested that easy-to-use, networked readers like the Kindle “can help return to us our attention spans and extend what makes books great: words and their meaning.”5 That’s a sentiment most literary-minded folks would be eager to share. But it’s wishful thinking. Crovitz has fallen victim to the blindness that McLuhan warned against: the inability to see how a change in a medium’s form is also a change in its content. “E-books should not just be print books delivered electronically,” says a senior vice president of HarperStudio, an imprint of the publishing giant HarperCollins. “We need to take advantage of the medium and create something dynamic to enhance the experience. I want links and behind the scenes extras and narration and videos and conversation.”6 As soon as you inject a book with links and connect it to the Web—as soon as you “extend” and “enhance” it and make it “dynamic”—you change what it is and you change, as well, the experience of reading it. An e-book is no more a book than an online newspaper is a newspaper.