The Shallows by Nicholas Carr Review

This book has been sitting on my shelf for a while. Books like these are like broccoli for me—I'm supposed to read them, I know it’s good for me, but I still push them to the edge of my bookshelf and try to ignore them like broccoli on my plate. We all know the internet is bad for us. Who wants to hear all about it? What are we supposed to do?

But regardless, this book is great. Yes, it does that thing that a lot of accessible nonfiction does, where it repeats its main ideas a lot, but that just comes with the territory. The first half comes in really strong. It discusses how human brains have the ability to change with our surroundings and how we utilize them. For example, Carr brings up that reading and writing haven’t existed for as long as humans have been around, so our minds and how we process information were different before. I’ve never thought about that if I'm being honest.

Although I was a bit worried it would be too technical for me to grasp, it’s pretty readable. It breaks down why giants like Google are so prolific and profitable—any online app or website is built to keep consumers on it, to keep clicking, swiping, staring. The guise of being helpful with suggestions is all to keep the money rolling in as we are faced with more ads. The limits of our memory—as technology and a mass of information a click away arose—has caused our minds to cling onto less information. Carr asks us: at what cost does thinking less bring?

Ultimately, I understand why books like these are not super popular in the community of book reviewers that I exist in. I’m more of a literary fiction girl myself. We live in scary times—who wants to be faced with more negative information, reminding us yet again of how the supposedly greatest innovators of our time have failed us? But I go to bat for books like these because they challenge me to think and dream of more for myself than running in a perpetual hamster wheel of constant scrolling, feeling awful, and then doing it all over again. Although it doesn’t exactly say how to fix it, it puts me on the right path of knowing why, why, why. For me, sometimes that’s exactly what I want in a book.