Logan Ramsey
Editor-in-Chief
In Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows,” a book that every communications major has more than likely been assigned to read at least once, he talks about the ways the internet has changed how he thinks. The scariest part is that I can see myself in what he says.
If you’re someone who used to read much more than you do now, or have ever been the student to skim through the reading for a class, “The Shallows” is the book for you to pick up. I think this book is targeted to all those ex-avid readers out there who miss their old habits.
If you feel like you’re apart of this group, according to Carr, you’re not alone. He references three of his writer friends who have the same issues with reading that Carr himself has. Carr describes his eyes drifting off the page and his mind wandering to different places when he used to do deep dives into narratives and arguments, and his friends describe that problem as well.
Instead, Carr’s friends consume information that they deem as pertinent to what they’re researching and skim over the surface of web pages.
Our age group exists in what Carr calls the “Net Generation,” a generation of readers who have grown up with the internet and therefore have read this way for a long time.
I’m only sixty pages into the book so far, but already I can recognize myself in what he’s talking about as a part of the net generation. I used to be a voracious reader. It was all I did in elementary school — reading was an essential part of my life, and my thirst for words was never quite quenched when I was younger.
Flash forward to age twenty, and I have at least three books in the last five months that I have started and not finished. I’ll even admit to not doing the reading for my classes often enough for it to be a problem. I’ve known this is a problem since my senior year of high school, when I had an excellent literature teacher who drilled the importance of reading into me, but the problems continued since then.
To many of you this might not be a problem, but if you’re anything like me, it’s not hard to recognize yourself in these struggles with reading.
That’s the effect that Carr’s text has on the reader in “The Shallows.” If, at any point when you’re reading the book, your eyes wander off the text or you think about other things you could be doing at the moment, you’re only proving Carr right.
However, despite proving a professor right — something college students may not love to hear — there is hope in all of this. It’s found in neurology, which explains that we are constantly losing and building neural pathways.
Carr talks about this in the text, how thanks to modern neurology we now know that this is true even for adults. If we’re not using neural pathways, than we lose them. In that way, the brain’s like a muscle.
That means that if any of you have lost your fire for reading, all hope isn’t lost. You can rebuild that ability to get out of the shallows and get lost in the pages of a book.
All that means is that you have to start reading again, sooner rather than later, because it’ll get harder the longer you wait.
