Writer warns about Internet 'interruptions'

There’s a dark side to the Internet, and civilization is at a crucial point in its history, a prolific technology writer told listeners at the Northwest Montana Reading Council’s Back to School Literacy Conference recently held at Flathead High School.

Nicholas Carr was the 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist in the general nonfiction category for his book, “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” He’s not a technophobe, but he’s not on Facebook or Twitter and doesn’t own a smartphone.

Carr wants to be more thoughtful about the type of technology he uses and the time he invests in the Internet, and he delivered a message of caution about the cognitive tradeoffs people are making in exchange for a connection to new and immediate information through the Internet.

“In the history of thought, we’re at a crucial moment,” he said.

Carr began his research on the Internet’s effect on the way people think after he found himself struggling to maintain concentration whether online or reading a book.

“There’s a dark side to all of this,” Carr said. “We’ve learned that an information-rich environment is also, and by necessity, an interruption-rich environment.”

There are alerts and notifications to attend to, new text messages, e-mails, Tweets and Facebook status updates to check, videos to watch, apps to use and links to click through.

“We like information,” Carr said. “There seems to be a deep primitive instinct in us to want to know everything that’s going on around us.”  

All these distractions discourage attentive, concentrated and focused thinking, Carr said.

“Distractions are cumulative,” Carr said. “You have to appreciate all these things are happening all the time in our lives and in our kids’ lives. As you ratchet up all these things, we’re in a constant state of interruption, a constant state of distraction.”

With attention divided, people begin to lose their ability to focus on a single task and think critically. Carr said the average adult spends about 10 seconds on a Web page. When people read online, they tend to skim over information in a quick F-shaped pattern before moving on.

“It turns out this has a very big and very negative effect on our ability to tap into the richest, deepest forms of thinking that are available to us,” Carr said.

A symbol for the new digital environment is the video game, Carr said. A successful “gamer” constantly scans the screen rather than concentrating in one area. This provides gamers with greater visual acuity and spatial intelligence, but Carr wondered at what cost they achieved these.

He also cited a study by Cornell College that showed cognitive overload by students using laptops during a college lecture. The students who had their laptops open — whether they were browsing sites related to the lecture or shopping for shoes — scored poorly. There is not enough “space” in working memory to contain all the activity before it’s transferred to long-term memory, Carr said.

“If you let kids look at their phones or look at their computers while you’re trying to teach them something, they’re not going to remember it as well. They’re going to suffer from cognitive overload,” Carr said. “There is a sacrifice in learning. There is a sacrifice in comprehension and retention if the student is distracted — if the student is engaged in technology when they’re trying to learn other things.”

Carr doesn’t disagree with the Internet’s usefulness, but he thinks society needs to challenge the rush to embrace it.

“We owe it to ourselves, to our students and to our kids to think more rigorously, more critically in this rapid shift we’re going through,” Carr said.