The Shallows

by Nicholas Carr

  Soon after the author Steven Johnson began reading e-books on his new Kindle, he realized that “the book’s migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write, and sell books in profound ways.” He was excited by the Kindle’s potential for expanding “the universe of books at our fingertips” and making books as searchable as Web pages. But the digital device also filled him with trepidation: “I fear that one of the great joys of book reading—the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas—will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.” 7

  Christine Rosen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, recently wrote about her experience using a Kindle to read the Dickens novel Nicholas Nickleby. Her story underscores Johnson’s fears: “Although mildly disorienting at first, I quickly adjusted to the Kindle’s screen and mastered the scroll and page-turn buttons. Nevertheless, my eyes were restless and jumped around as they do when I try to read for a sustained time on the computer. Distractions abounded. I looked up Dickens on Wikipedia, then jumped straight down the Internet rabbit hole following a link about a Dickens short story, ‘Mugby Junction.’ Twenty minutes later I still hadn’t returned to my reading of Nickleby on the Kindle.”8

  Rosen’s struggle sounds almost identical to the one that the historian David Bell went through back in 2005 when he read a new electronic book, The Genesis of Napoleonic Propaganda, on the Internet. He described his experience in a New Republic article: “A few clicks, and the text duly appears on my computer screen. I start reading, but while the book is well written and informative, I find it remarkably hard to concentrate. I scroll back and forth, search for key words, and interrupt myself even more often than usual to refill my coffee cup, check my e-mail, check the news, rearrange files in my desk drawer. Eventually I get through the book and am glad to have done so. But a week later I find it remarkably hard to remember what I have read.” 9

  When a printed book—whether a recently published scholarly history or a two-hundred-year-old Victorian novel—is transferred to an electronic device connected to the Internet, it turns into something very like a Web site. Its words become wrapped in all the distractions of the networked computer. Its links and other digital enhancements propel the reader hither and yon. It loses what the late John Updike called its “edges” and dissolves into the vast, roiling waters of the Net.10 The linearity of the printed book is shattered, along with the calm attentiveness it encourages in the reader. The high-tech features of devices like the Kindle and Apple’s new iPad may make it more likely that we’ll read e-books, but the way we read them will be very different from the way we read printed editions.

  CHANGES IN READING style will also bring changes in writing style, as authors and their publishers adapt to readers’ new habits and expectations. A striking example of this process is already on display in Japan. In 2001, young Japanese women began composing stories on their mobile phones, as strings of text messages, and uploading them to a Web site, Maho no i-rando, where other people read and commented on them. The stories expanded into serialized “cell phone novels,” and their popularity grew. Some of the novels found millions of readers online. Publishers took notice, and began to bring out the novels as printed books. By the end of the decade, cell phone novels had come to dominate the country’s best-seller lists. The three top-selling Japanese novels in 2007 were all originally written on mobile phones.

  The form of the novels reflects their origins. They are, according to the reporter Norimitsu Onishi, “mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels.” One of the most popular cell phone novelists, a twenty-one-year-old who goes by the name of Rin, explained to Onishi why young readers are abandoning traditional novels: “They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them.”11 The popularity of cell phone novels may never extend beyond Japan, a country given to peculiar fads, but the novels nevertheless demonstrate how changes in reading inevitably spur changes in writing.

  Another sign of how the Web is beginning to influence book writing came in 2009, when O’Reilly Media, an American publisher of technology books, brought out a book about Twitter that had been created with Microsoft’s PowerPoint presentation software. “We’ve long been interested in exploring how the online medium changes the presentation, narrative and structure of the book,” said the firm’s chief executive, Tim O’Reilly, in introducing the volume, which is available in both print and electronic editions. “Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle. Here, we’ve used a web-like model of standalone pages, each of which can be read alone (or at most in a group of two or three).” The “modular architecture” reflects the way people’s reading practices have changed as they’ve adapted to online text, O’Reilly explained. The Web “provides countless lessons about how books need to change when they move online.”12

  Some of the changes in the way books are written and presented will be dramatic. At least one major publisher, Simon & Schuster, has already begun publishing e-novels that have videos embedded in their virtual pages. The hybrids are known as “vooks.” Other companies have similar multimedia experiments in the works. “Everybody is trying to think about how books and information will best be put together in the 21st century,” said Simon & Schuster executive Judith Curr in explaining the impetus behind vooks. “You can’t just be linear anymore with your text.”13

  Other changes in form and content will be subtle, and they’ll develop slowly. As more readers come to discover books through online text searches, for example, authors will face growing pressures to tailor their words to search engines, the way bloggers and other Web writers routinely do today. Steven Johnson sketches out some of the likely consequences: “Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google’s results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors. Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank.”14

  Many observers believe it’s only a matter of time before social-networking functions are incorporated into digital readers, turning reading into something like a team sport. We’ll chat and pass virtual notes while scanning electronic text. We’ll subscribe to services that automatically update our e-books with comments and revisions added by fellow readers. “Soon,” says Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book, an arm of USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication, “books will literally have discussions inside of them, both live chats and asynchronous exchanges through comments and social annotation. You will be able to see who else out there is reading that book and be able to open up a dialog with them.”15 In a much-discussed essay, the science writer Kevin Kelly even suggested that we’ll be holding communal cut-and-paste parties online. We’ll cobble together new books from bits and pieces lifted out of old ones. “Once digitized,” he wrote, “books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books,” which will then “be published and swapped in the public commons.”16

  That particular scenario may or may not come to pass, but it does seem inevitable that the Web’s tendency to turn all media into social media will have a far-reaching effect on styles of reading and writing and hence on language itself. When the form of the book shifted to accommodate silent reading, one of the most important results was the development of private writing. Authors, able to assume that an attentive reader, deeply engaged both intellectually and emotionally, “would c
ome at last, and would thank them,” quickly jumped beyond the limits of social speech and began to explore a wealth of distinctively literary forms, many of which could exist only on the page. The new freedom of the private writer led, as we’ve seen, to a burst of experimentation that expanded vocabulary, extended the boundaries of syntax, and in general increased the flexibility and expressiveness of language. Now that the context of reading is again shifting, from the private page to the communal screen, authors will adapt once more. They will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the essayist Caleb Crain describes as “groupiness,” where people read mainly “for the sake of a feeling of belonging” rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement.17 As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style. Writing will become a means for recording chatter.

  The provisional nature of digital text also promises to influence writing styles. A printed book is a finished object. Once inked onto the page, its words become indelible. The finality of the act of publishing has long instilled in the best and most conscientious writers and editors a desire, even an anxiety, to perfect the works they produce—to write with an eye and an ear toward eternity. Electronic text is impermanent. In the digital marketplace, publication becomes an ongoing process rather than a discrete event, and revision can go on indefinitely. Even after an e-book is downloaded into a networked device, it can be easily and automatically updated—just as software programs routinely are today.18 It seems likely that removing the sense of closure from book writing will, in time, alter writers’ attitudes toward their work. The pressure to achieve perfection will diminish, along with the artistic rigor that the pressure imposed. To see how small changes in writers’ assumptions and attitudes can eventually have large effects on what they write, one need only glance at the history of correspondence. A personal letter written in, say, the nineteenth century bears little resemblance to a personal e-mail or text message written today. Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.19

  No doubt the connectivity and other features of e-books will bring new delights and diversions. We may even, as Kelly suggests, come to see digitization as a liberating act, a way of freeing text from the page. But the cost will be a further weakening, if not a final severing, of the intimate intellectual attachment between the lone writer and the lone reader. The practice of deep reading that became popular in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention, in which “the quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind,” will continue to fade, in all likelihood becoming the province of a small and dwindling elite. We will, in other words, revert to the historical norm. As a group of Northwestern University professors wrote in a 2005 article in the Annual Review of Sociology, the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the “era of mass [book] reading” was a brief “anomaly” in our intellectual history: “We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the “power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital” or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of “an increasingly arcane hobby.”20

  When Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, introduced the Kindle, he sounded a self-congratulatory note: “It’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as a book and improve on it. And maybe even change the way people read.”21 There’s no “maybe” about it. The way people read—and write—has already been changed by the Net, and the changes will continue as, slowly but surely, the words of books are extracted from the printed page and embedded in the computer’s “ecology of interruption technologies.”

  PUNDITS HAVE BEEN trying to bury the book for a long time. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the burgeoning popularity of newspapers—well over a hundred were being published in London alone—led many observers to assume that books were on the verge of obsolescence. How could they compete with the immediacy of the daily broadsheet? “Before this century shall end, journalism will be the whole press—the whole human thought,” declared the French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine in 1831. “Thought will spread across the world with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood. It will blanket the earth from one pole to the other—sudden, instantaneous, burning with the fervor of the soul from which it burst forth. This will be the reign of the human word in all its plenitude. Thought will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book—the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a newspaper.”22

  Lamartine was mistaken. At the century’s end, books were still around, living happily beside newspapers. But a new threat to their existence had already emerged: Thomas Edison’s phonograph. It seemed obvious, at least to the intelligentsia, that people would soon be listening to literature rather than reading it. In an 1889 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, Philip Hubert predicted that “many books and stories may not see the light of print at all; they will go into the hands of their readers, or hearers rather, as phonograms.” The phonograph, which at the time could record sounds as well as play them, also “promises to far outstrip the typewriter” as a tool for composing prose, he wrote.23 That same year, the futurist Edward Bellamy suggested, in a Harper’s article, that people would come to read “with the eyes shut.” They would carry around a tiny audio player, called an “indispensable,” which would contain all their books, newspapers, and magazines. Mothers, wrote Bellamy, would no longer have “to make themselves hoarse telling the children stories on rainy days to keep them out of mischief.” The kids would all have their own indispensables.24

  Five years later, Scribner’s Magazine delivered the seeming coup de grâce to the codex, publishing an article titled “The End of Books” by Octave Uzanne, an eminent French author and publisher. “What is my view of the destiny of books, my dear friends?” he wrote. “I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretation of our mental products.” Printing, a “somewhat antiquated process” that for centuries “has reigned despotically over the mind of man,” would be replaced by “phonography,” and libraries would be turned into “phonographotecks.” We would see a return of “the art of utterance,” as narrators took the place of writers. “The ladies,” Uzanne concluded, “will no longer say in speaking of a successful author, ‘What a charming writer!’ All shuddering with emotion, they will sigh, ‘Ah, how this “Teller’s” voice thrills you, charms you, moves you.’”25

  The book survived the phonograph as it had the newspaper. Listening didn’t replace reading. Edison’s invention came to be used mainly for playing music rather than declaiming poetry and prose. During the twentieth century, book reading would withstand a fresh onslaught of seemingly mortal threats: moviegoing, radio listening, TV viewing. Today, books remain as commonplace as ever, and there’s every reason to believe that printed works will continue to be produced and read, in some sizable quantity, for years to come. While physical books may be on the road to obsolescence, the road will almost certainly be a long and winding one. Yet the continued existence of the codex, though it may provide some cheer to bibliophiles, doesn’t change the fact that books and book reading, at least as we’ve defined those things in the past, are in their cultural twilight. As a society, we devote ever less time to reading printed words, and even when we do read them, we do so in the busy shadow of the Internet. “Already,” the literary critic George Steiner wrote in 1997, “the silences, the arts of concentration and memorization, the luxuries of time on which ‘high reading’ depended are largely disposed.” But “these erosions,” he continued, “are nearly insignificant compared with the brave ne
w world of the electronic.”26 Fifty years ago, it would have been possible to make the case that we were still in the age of print. Today, it is not.

  Some thinkers welcome the eclipse of the book and the literary mind it fostered. In a recent address to a group of teachers, Mark Federman, an education researcher at the University of Toronto, argued that literacy, as we’ve traditionally understood it, “is now nothing but a quaint notion, an aesthetic form that is as irrelevant to the real questions and issues of pedagogy today as is recited poetry—clearly not devoid of value, but equally no longer the structuring force of society.” The time has come, he said, for teachers and students alike to abandon the “linear, hierarchical” world of the book and enter the Web’s “world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity”—a world in which “the greatest skill” involves “discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux.”27

  Clay Shirky, a digital-media scholar at New York University, suggested in a 2008 blog post that we shouldn’t waste our time mourning the death of deep reading—it was overrated all along. “No one reads War and Peace,” he wrote, singling out Tolstoy’s epic as the quintessence of high literary achievement. “It’s too long, and not so interesting.” People have “increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it.” The same goes for Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and other novels that until recently were considered, in Shirky’s cutting phrase, “Very Important in some vague way.” Indeed, we’ve “been emptily praising” writers like Tolstoy and Proust “all these years.” Our old literary habits “were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access.”28 Now that the Net has granted us abundant “access,” Shirky concluded, we can at last lay those tired habits aside.