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<h1 id="post-title">The Shallows: Thinking in the Age of the Web</h1>
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<h1 id="introduction">Introduction</h1>
<p>(These are excerpts from emails to a friend.)</p>
<p>The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is a great Pulitzer-nominated book on, well, what the Internet is doing to our brains. It talks about how the medium constrains and dictates the message - why books are so great for long-span deep focus, and why web pages and FB and Twitter and Tinder lead to ultra-short hyperactive behaviour (average time spent on a web page is around 7 seconds or so). Habit reinforcement is definitely one factor, but you don’t have to propose a conspiracy by the top corporations. He says that certain mediums naturally lend themselves to addictive behaviour or shallow thinking (by constraining the types of messages they can carry).</p>
<h1 id="oral-vs-literate-cultures">Oral vs Literate Cultures</h1>
<p>Aside: I was fascinated by the author’s explanation of how writing changed the way we think. Oral cultures, for example, abound with cliches like “wise and kind ruler”, “evil vizier”, “selfless and humble hero”, and “beautiful princess” because they are easier to memorize and pass on in poems than complex character traits.</p>
<p>Apparently, the written word allowed people for the first time to formulate and follow long, complex logical arguments in ways that speech couldn’t. Basically, understanding a speech is about processing an ephemeral stream of words in real time (and you can’t even control the speed of the stream!), whereas reading a book is about processing a hierarchically-organized list of words, with the ability to slow down or speed up or skim or skip or even backtrack according to your skill or desire (as I saw above when I left the 1h45m podcast in favour of the articles that I could analyze within 10m). I try to keep this in mind when listening to speeches or lectures or even when watching movies - they’re fundamentally constrained by the fact that we can’t follow nested arguments very well in real time.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Friend</strong>: I wonder if they have experiments and hypothesis testing to make claims like these. Anthropological studies to determine what came first viz a viz complex logical statements through written words vs speech to determine would need be incredibly ingenious no?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Kind of. This is where it helps to have a diverse world population. You will find some demographics that have naturally isolated the variables you care about.</p>
<p>For example, I’ve heard that geneticists have wet dreams about Iceland because of its homogeneous population:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Iceland is desolate, remote and isolated. The country is a natural wonder boasting dramatic waterfalls and icy glaciers.</p>
<p>Since the Vikings settled there more than 1,200 years ago, Iceland’s population has remained relatively cut off from the rest of the world, leading to an extremely homogenous gene pool.</p>
<p>As much as 90% of the population is considered to be pure Icelandic.</p>
<p>– The key to curing disease could lie in Iceland’s genes, <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/16/health/iceland-genes-genealogy-alzheimers-exp/index.html">CNN article</a></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Established by Norsemen and Celts in 9 A.D., Iceland has a remarkably homogenous population that can trace its lineage to just a few common ancestors, according to Kari Stefansson, deCODE’s founder and CEO. That means that there’s less genetic variation, which in turn means less background noise to interfere with the identification of meaningful gene variants. In the new papers, the tally is 20 million variants, some of which have already been linked to diseases.</p>
<p>– Why Iceland Is the World’s Greatest Genetic Laboratory, <a href="https://www.wired.com/2015/03/iceland-worlds-greatest-genetic-laboratory/">Wired article</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, when it comes to literate vs oral traditions (or anything modern vs primitive), you look at tribes that are isolated from our civilization and still have oral traditions going on.</p>
<p>Walter Ong is the man when it comes to oral traditions. He analyzed cultures with different levels of literacy.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A major concern of Ong’s works is the impact that the shift from orality to literacy has had on culture and education. Writing is a technology like other technologies (fire, the steam engine, etc.) that, when introduced to a “primary oral culture” (which has never known writing) has extremely wide-ranging impacts in all areas of life. These include culture, economics, politics, art, and more. Furthermore, even a small amount of education in writing transforms people’s mentality from the holistic immersion of orality to interiorization and individuation.</p>
<p>Many of the effects of the introduction of the technology of writing are related to the fact that oral cultures require strategies of preserving information in the absence of writing. These include, for example, a reliance on proverbs or condensed wisdom for making decisions, epic poetry, and stylized culture heroes (wise Nestor, crafty Odysseus). Writing makes these features no longer necessary, and introduces new strategies of remembering cultural material, which itself now changes.</p>
<p>Because cultures at any given time vary along a continuum between full orality and full literacy, Ong distinguishes between primary oral cultures (which have never known writing), cultures with craft literacy (such as scribes), and cultures in a transition phase from orality to literacy, in which some people know of writing but are illiterate - these cultures have “residual orality”.</p>
<p>– <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong#Summary_of_Ong.27s_works_and_interests">Summary from Walter Ong’s Wikipedia page</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>As to the present-day differences between oral and written mediums, you can readily test humans now (as I showed above with listening to the podcast vs reading the articles).</p>
<p>When they first started writing, theyapparentlydidn’tleavespacesbetweenwords because they were going to read it aloud anyway. (Reminds me of our Hindu rituals - everybody chants everything even when reading from a book. Suggests the present-day echo of an ancient oral culture.) That basically turned the written passage into a speech, with all the concomitant difficulties of oral comprehension. Later, people invented <em>spaces</em> to make things easier to read silently. Sounds weird, right? We take that for granted! We don’t have spaces between words when we speak (even though it seems we do, but we don’t).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even as the technology of the book sped ahead, the legacy of the oral world continued to shape the way words on pages were written and read. Silent reading was largely unknown in the ancient world. The new codices, like the tablets and scrolls that preceded them, were almost always read aloud, whether the reader was in a group or alone. In a famous passage in his Confessions, Saint Augustine described the surprise he felt when, around the year AD 380, he saw Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, reading silently to himself. “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still,” wrote Augustine. “Often, when we came to see him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.” Baffled by such peculiar behavior, Augustine wondered whether Ambrose “needed to spare his voice, which quite easily became hoarse.”</p>
<p>– The Shallows</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Regarding the complex arguments thesis:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The arguments in books became longer and clearer, as well as more complex and more challenging, as writers strived self-consciously to refine their ideas and their logic. By the end of the fourteenth century, written works were often being divided into paragraphs and chapters, and they sometimes included tables of contents to help guide the reader through their increasingly elaborate structures.</p>
<p>– The Shallows</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Things we take for granted, like spaces and paragraphs and chapters and double-sided pages and bound books instead of scrolls, weren’t even present in the old texts.</p>
<h2 id="shallow-vs-deep-mediums">Shallow vs Deep Mediums</h2>
<p>More worryingly, Nicholas Carr contends that once you use a medium for long, your brain adapts to become good at handling that particular medium, to the detriment of other mediums. This means that it becomes easier and thus more motivating to stick to that medium and much harder to get back to other mediums. For example, when I watch YouTube videos too often or surf too many web pages for too long, I find it hard to sit in a quiet place and dive into a book. My mind itches to get back to the quick rewards of the web. The opposite is true when I read books everyday - I don’t feel the pull of silly little tweets or videos; my mind is in deep thinking mode.</p>
<p>So, the aim would be to get off shallow mediums and spend as much time as possible on deep mediums. They’re both competing for our attention and neither can live while the other survives.</p>
<p>Paul Graham wrote a great essay about addictiveness: <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html">The Acceleration of Addictiveness</a>.</p>
<p>This book suggests an antidote to the shallow thinking encouraged by modern mediums: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work">Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World</a>. The guy’s an MIT CS PhD and a prof now, so it’s not some wishy-washy death-to-the-machines kind of stuff. It’s about solving the kind of focus-demanding hard problems we CS guys encounter.</p>
<h1 id="distractions">Distractions</h1>
<p>With a physical book you have <strong>zero</strong> distractions. Think about that for a minute. There is <em>nothing</em> else you can do apart from reading. You can’t check your email or get a notification about new mails. You can’t get random pings or updates from Facebook. You can’t listen to music in a new browser tab or app. You can’t check the scores of the latest match online. All you can do is read. And yet, that is perhaps all we need.</p>
<h1 id="my-experience">My Experience</h1>
<p>Test: [2019-02-05 Tue] I’ve blocked Reddit and other internet websites for the last few days and stopped watching YouTube videos. I’ve been reading books during meal times instead of putting on some video. Now, when I try to watch a video, it feels boring and shallow. I’ve had this same experience in the past when I’ve gone on a book-reading binge, but I’ve eventually succumbed to the allure of videos. This time, let’s take it all the way.</p>
<h1 id="notes">Notes</h1>
<p>Thanks to my friend Sudharshan for the stimulating conversations on this topic.</p>
<div class="info">Created: May 9, 2017</div>
<div class="info">Last modified: September 28, 2019</div>
<div class="info">Status: finished</div>
<div class="info"><b>Tags</b>: shallows, medium, reading, web surfing</div>
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