Review of Carr and Dean from LBO

Left Business Observer
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our
Brains , W.W. Norton, 276 pp. $26.95.
Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Culture in the Age of the
Drive, Polity Press, 140 pp., $19.95.


Hearts fluttered over the contribution of Facebook and Twitter to the Middle Eastern uprisings. No doubt they contributed, but so did things like pre-existing union agitation in Egypt. And it wouldn’t have happened had people not gotten out of their pajamas and into the streets. But, over the longer term, what is our
wired world doing to our minds and cultures?

These two books come at the same problem from different directions. Jodi Dean’s is explicitly from the left and rather theoretical, and Nicholas Carr’s isn’t explicitly political and is mostly empirical. But they both make you worry about the Internet’s effect on us. Neither author is a Luddite, and both blog. And they’re aware of the oddness of writing a book about the topic. The new media world is fast, faster even than TV, which rewards “fast thinkers,” as Pierre Bourdieu put it (see LBO #83). The speed of TV is driven by advertisers, who fear that anything seriously disruptive, like pausing to think, might interfere with sales effort. Though those preferences have become embedded in the assumptions of producers—they love bombast, phony conflict, quick cuts—one could still imagine serious conversation on TV, or disruptive art—in fact, we’ve all seen that now and then.


But the speed and fragmentation of today’s web is driven by its very structure, the restless displacement of links, the hypervalorization of the very newest, the evanescent rush of the Tweetable. Advertising,meaning the lust for links and traffic, is making it worse, but it’s also in the structure of the medium. But, as Dean says, writing a book is an instance of that “time-honored tactic in workers’ struggle: the slow-down.”

Shallow. Carr, while no Marxist, clearly thinks that materiality shapes consciousness. He contrasts our present feeling of information overload with the sense of calm and reassuring about the shelves of a library: “Take your time, the books whispered to me in their dusty voices. We’re not going anywhere.” Contrast that with these sensory experience of a web page, which pulsates with links, videos, ads, all designed to tempt us to visit somewhere else, lest we miss the newest thing. That’s not just some moralizing claim, another iteration of “Kids today!” Despite early claims that all those links and embedded graphics would deepen understanding, research proves otherwise. People who read straight text comprehend more, remember more, and read more quickly than do those who read the same text tarted up in typical web fashion. Readers’ attention is distracted by links—even if they don’t follow them. The same with flashy graphics. Their eyes leap all over the screen instead of reading the text continuously. All the stimuli simply overload the neural circuits, impoverishing the cognitive experience rather than enriching it. Related to this proliferation of stimuli—I wanted to quote T.S. Eliot’s line “distracted from distraction by distraction” in this review, but, sadly, Carr beat me to it—is the proliferation of multitasking in our hyperconnected world. Research shows we’re not watching any less TV than before, despite spending more time on the Internet; the reason seems to be we’re doing both at once. And this, too, means a degradation of thinking. Carr quotes the neurologist Jordan Grafman as saying that “optimizing for multitasking” (optimizing our brains, not our hardware) makes us less thoughtful, less inventive, and less productive—and more inclined to accept conventional ways of thinking. Isn’t that just what the doctor ordered?

Carr is bothered by Google’s project to digitize many of the world’s books. As wonderful as that sounds—and much of it is—the effect of turning vast libraries into discrete pages is to dismember complex argument and narrative into isolated bits. Again, connectivity promotes disconnection. And it is in Google’s material interest to promote clicks, not extended reading; a page lingered over means a hit to an advertiser’s click-through rate. But there are some cyber-partisans who welcome the fragmentation of reading —especially the egregious Clay Shirky, who thinks that it’s good we’re giving up on big novels. Writers like Tolstoy and Proust may have been “Very Important in some vague way,” says Shirky, but reading stuff like that was just a “side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access.” Now we can dump all that. Other cyber-cheerleaders say that with Google, we need not burden our minds with remembering so many things, which will leave more storage space for…it’s not clear exactly. This is a sideeffect of living in an environment that sees the mind as a computer. But, as Carr argues, thought is in part constructed from memory; if we don’t have things in our heads, we can’t draw connections. We’re not like computers, really, though our connected life is making us more so.

Much of Carr’s argument relies on neurology—physical changes to the brain caused by our exposure to the web. But, as Cordelia Fine argues in her wonderful book Delusions of Gender, there’s a tendency to think that explaining things at the cellular level is somehow regarded as more authoritative than social and psychological explanations. Yes, our activities can change our brains. But wouldn’t you expect any aspect of social life that changed the way we think and feel to show up in the brain? As Fine asks, where else would it show up? Why the fetish for neuroscience? It’s not like Carr has nothing intelligent or compelling to say about intellectual or social life.

Speedy. Jodi Dean doesn’t write about neurology. She writes in the language of theory, which many earnest lefties think is annoying, which is too bad for them. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Zizek, Dean worries about what she calls the collapse of symbolic efficiency—the capacity of words and other symbols to communicate meaning broadly and effectively. Blogs and such contribute to a fragmentation in both style and content—in jokes shared among a small circle, an opacity of tone (satiric? serious? both?)—that make understanding, much less solidarity, far more difficult. There’s always another link, another displacement, another doubt: nothing can ever be pinned down. This results in a flattened worldview: “As multiple-recombinant ideas and images circulate, stimulate, they distract us from the antagonisms constitutive of contemporary society, inviting us to think that each opinion is equally valid, each option is equally likely, and each click is a significant political intervention…. Drowning in plurality, we lose the capacity to grasp anything like a system. React and forward, but don’t by any means think.”

With the not-so-news that blogs are declining in favor of social networking, the blog is now becoming the  format for long-form journalism on the web. What does that mean? Dean argues that it’s wrong to evaluate blogs just by studying their content, whether journalistic or diaristic, or style, be it narcissistic or derivative (or sometimes arresting and thoughtful). That’s not enough: the materiality of the medium has to be investigated as
well, meaning its routine of endless updates and links, with the newest posts at the top with older ones stacked below in reverse chronological order. Feelings often take precedence over thought, and immediacy over distance. There’s something compulsive about it. One posts, often into the void—and then Tweets the post, comments elsewhere, and posts again. “The value added…stems purely from the being added,” Dean writes. It’s not only that there’s no closure—there’s hardly a moment’s rest. It all attempts to make connections, but actual contact is elusive; instead, there’s an endless repetition of the post–link–click routine. The means the death of “reflection,” which had been central to Western philosophy for several centuries.  But of course it’s now all about social media; commentary is taking a back seat to sharing cat videos, political outrages, and the news that one is in urgent need of coffee. One survey—who knows if it’s true, but it was on the Internet—revealed that a quarter of Americans check Facebook while in the bathroom.

One quibble with Dean’s otherwise excellent book: following Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, she makes a great deal of what she calls “communicative capitalism,” the idea that the circulation of information and images have to a large degree replaced production as the motors of economic activity. As LBO #96 noted in its review of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, reading their claims about immaterial labor might lead one to forget “that far more Americans are truck drivers than computer professionals. Nor would you have much of an inkling that 3 billion of us, half the earth’s population, live in the rural Third World, where the major occupation remains tilling the soil.” Such oversights are an occupational hazard of intellectuals. 

Networked. These days it’s all about the network. Network models of economic life are popular with management theorists, those of social organization are popular with cybertopians, and those of political resistance have been popular among radicals at least since Seattle. Nets are often presented as alternatives to large, hierarchical, and centralized entities. But as Dean shows, you can trace a lot of this thinking back to work that the RAND Corp. did for the military decades ago. (And recall that the Internet itself was conceived of by the Pentagon, its decentralized structure designed to maximize its survivability after a nuclear war.) Large corporations are major fans of networks—nodes of subcontractors, temporary employees, dispersed sites production. In other words, there’s nothing at all revolutionary about the network, and much of the left’s embrace of the notion (as an alternative to building sustainable institutions) needs to be strenuously interrogated. Nor do networks necessarily undermine hierarchy. Empirical studies of networks repeatedly show that some nodes emerge as dominant, surrounded by a very large periphery. The top hits on a Google search will always get the most attention, a fact that’s reinforced everytime they’re clicked on and linked to. What we now call the “legacy” mass media allowed for common identifications; they called  collectivities into being. Networked media, by contrast, traffic mainly in particularities. “There is no us. There is no me….” Instead, there’s an endlessly reconstituted series of virtual “me’s.” In the old days, critics worried about the top-down nature of traditional media. “Don’t hate the media. Become the media,” urged Jello Biafra. But what, Dean asks, if the new media model results in our “contribut[ing] to our own capture”? Guy Debord wrote about how the society of the spectacle left no room for reply, for popular opinion. Now, we’re overwhelmed by comments, a frenzy of controversializing that leads nowhere. Distrust of expertise becomes ubiquitous; instead of critical evaluation, we now live in a regime of reflexive doubt. Progress?