Even though “The Shallows” was initially published in 2010, I found it to still be relevant while reading it in 2023. Not much has changed in the updated edition from 2020 except for a new introduction and an afterword, surely a lot of insights are missing linked to the usage of smartphones, apps, etc. but I still found that a lot of valuable information could be retained from the book. I have included it in my list of all time favourite books, it has left a remarkable impact on me (probably having finished reading it at the right moment in my life) and I was really glad to have finally gotten it off my “want to read” list thanks to my favourite “Grow Your Mindset Paris Book Club“.

First things first, why the one star reduction and not the full 5/5 ★ rating? I felt like the way the book was structured didn’t really go along with its title and what one would expect from it. It was only upon reading about 1/3 of the book that the influence of the internet on our brain was mentioned for the first time. The rest felt like a build-up to the topic , which was interesting but felt like the title was “click bait”. Naming the book something similar to “From Papyrus to Microchips: How Information Devices Changed our Brains throughout History” would have better fit with its content. At least after having braved one’s way through a third of the book we finally got the explanation of why we had to read through all of that first:

The deeper I dug into the science of neuroplasticity and the progress of intellectual technology, the clearer it became that the Internet’s importance and influence can be judged only when viewed in the fuller context of intellectual history.

p. 115

What I strongly felt and what was also described in the book was the difficulty that I had concentrating while reading. I was wondering whether it wasn’t written well enough for me to stick to it or whether by the author speaking about the internet, I was constantly thinking about the internet and was therefore constantly tempted to pick my phone up and do something else. Towards the final part of the book I ended up leaving my phone out of reach and sight, it working wonders for me. By the time I got to the newly added afterword, my assumptions have been confirmed through a series of studies that have been led, recreating an exam environment for test subjects:

As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. It was as if the smartphones had force fields that sapped their owners’ intelligence. […] Smartphones have become so tied up in our lives that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check a phone, which we routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking, the authors noted.

p. 230

Even though I didn’t necessarily get the point of the first third of the book in the beginning, I still learned tons of new things thanks to it:

• How depending on which medium you use to write, your thoughts form differently (p. 19);
• How the first evidence of neuroplasticity has been proven (p. 25);
• How much of an impact it has to go through specific actions in your brain, rather than exercising them physically (p. 33);
• How our lives changed forever when we started measuring time (p. 41), “In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to wake up, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock” (p. 211);
• How the appearance of maps has changed our way of thinking (p. 50);
• How we transitioned from an oral to a literary society (p. 56)

And many other topics! If some of these sound interesting to you, you’d very probably enjoy this book too!

What I really appreciated about “The Shallows” was how it pushed me to think of similar personal examples based on situations that were described. How we’re transitioning into a society where everything happens instantly (twitter, instagram, commentary online etc.) but how few people are actually enjoying the present moment (reflection on p. 97) and how important it is to exercise one’s “brain muscles” by engaging in activities requiring high concentration and deep thought regularly (since our brain is capable of rewiring itself after just one hour of a specific activity over a span of five days, p. 121).

[…] Thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted – to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers.

p. 194

Numerous facts that I’ve had in mind before were well explained through various scientific experiments, citing the exact sources, so that I felt like I deepened my understanding of certain phenomenons linked to the “new world filled with technology“. Why we’re so bad at multitasking (p. 131), why reading books on paper is so different and why (p. 134) and why during our current times people are so susceptible to propaganda and conspiracy theories (p. 238).

Finally, the part of the book that left the biggest impact on me, was the one touching upon smartphones. I regularly re-read Catherine Price’s book, “How to Break Up with Your Phone“, so some passages were already well known to me. Nevertheless, going though this information after reading through so much historical data, the ways how certain behaviour and devices modify our brain capacity, framed it in a different way. From the description of what our phone is to us nowadays, “Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library, a personal diary, and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object.” (p. 233), to why the latest smartphone trend is different to when “Video Killed the Radio Star”:

People always spent a lot of time watching television (and still do), but traditional TV viewing was concentrated at particular times – evenings, especially. It didn’t extend throughout the day. People weren’t carrying TVs in their pockets and pulling them out every few minutes. With smartphones, all time is prime time.

p. 228

Upon finishing the book I have taken the decision to put my most used social media channel on an indefinite break, as I saw it dominating my thoughts, my behaviour and my day to day life. I know that “The Shallows” is a book that I’d turn back to and which I’d use in order to explain certain things to unassuming friends with attention issues 😛 This has also made me curious to read other books written by the author and I hope that he will release a new one in the near future. A definite suggestion to anyone who is wondering into what kind of humans we’re turning by being constantly surrounded by the internet, computers and smartphones.

★★★★☆ (4/5)

_{Edition: ISBN 978-0-393-35782-0
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2020 (Originally published in 2010)}