It seemed obvious, at least to the intelligentsia, that people would soon be listening to literature rather than reading it. But a new threat to their existence had already emerged: Thomas Edison's phonograph. At the century's end, books were still around, living happily beside newspapers. The only book possible from today is a newspaper.' Thought will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book - the book will arrive too late. This will be the reign of the human word in all its plenitude. It will blanket the earth from one pole to the other - sudden, instantaneous, burning with the fervor of the soul from which it burst forth. 'Thought will spread across the world with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood. How could they compete with the immediacy of the daily broadsheet? 'Before this century shall end, journalism will be the whole press - the whole human thought,' declared the French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine in 1831. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the burgeoning popularity of newspapers - well over a hundred were being published in London alone - led many observers to assume that books were on the verge of obsolescence. Pundits have been trying to bury the book for a long time. Why can't the mind simply become better at a whole variety of intellectual tasks? The idea that the brain is a kind of zero sum game - that the ability to read incoming text messages is somehow diminishing our ability to read Moby Dick - is not altogether self-evident. Still, Carr argues that even if people get better at hopping from page to page, they will still be losing their abilities to employ a 'slower, more contemplative mode of thought.' He says research shows that as people get better at multitasking, they 'become less creative in their thinking.' Then again, reading online is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a generation of readers who grow up consuming everything on the screen may simply be more adept at online reading than people who were forced to switch from print. The book cites many studies that indicate that online reading yields lower comprehension than reading from a printed page. Would You Process This Information Better On Paper? the more adept we become at that mode of thinking.' And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning. 'They're very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. 'Neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered that, even as adults, our brains are very plastic,' Carr explains. This chronic state of distraction 'follows us' Carr argues, long after we shut down our computers.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

In the shallows book