THE ARTICLE · 7 MIN
The Shallows is Nicholas Carr’s argument that the internet is changing not just what we read but how we think. This summary gives its main ideas in our own words. Then it sets seven of its claims beside the research.
Several of its building blocks hold up. Its headline claim, that the web is making us shallower thinkers, is still being argued over.
About the book
W. W. Norton first published the book in 2010. Its subtitle, “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”, repeats the subtitle of an earlier essay by Carr. That essay was “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, which ran in The Atlantic in the July/August 2008 issue.
Its publisher lists it as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A 10th-anniversary edition in 2020 added “a new afterword that brings the story up to date”, on smartphones and social media.
It is a work of argument for general readers that mixes personal experience, the history of reading and writing, and neuroscience. Its publisher frames the question as “are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?”
The big ideas
1. The medium shapes the mind
Carr starts from Marshall McLuhan’s point that every new medium changes us, whatever content it carries. The web, he argues, is no exception. Its form, a stream of links, alerts and short pieces, matters more than any one thing we read on it.
2. It started with his own reading
He describes finding long reading harder than it used to be. He feels, as he puts it, that he is “always dragging my wayward brain back” to what he was reading. He reports others saying the same.
3. Brains are plastic
The book’s science chapters argue that the brain keeps changing with use. Carr quotes the neuroscientist Michael Merzenich calling the adult brain “massively plastic”, and adds that “the plasticity diminishes as we get older”.
If the brain adapts to what we practise, he argues, then hours of skimming and clicking train it to skim and click.
4. Tools of the mind
Maps, clocks and writing are what Carr, borrowing a term used by the sociologist Daniel Bell and others, calls “intellectual technologies”. Each changed how people think.
He recalls Socrates’ worry that writing would weaken memory. He also quotes Nietzsche, in the English translation Carr uses: “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
5. The book made deep reading possible
Carr argues that the printed book trained a rare kind of attention: long, quiet and focused on one thing. “In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book,” he writes, “people made their own associations”.
6. The Net is an interruption system
Here is the core of the book: “the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.” He calls the web “an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention”. He draws on research on hypertext and multitasking to argue that links and alerts add mental work and leave less for understanding.
7. Search and memory
In the later chapters he argues that leaning on the web as an outside memory changes what we bother to remember ourselves. In his view, it also changes what we are able to think with.
What holds up
The cheat sheet sets seven claims beside the research: the building blocks of Carr’s argument and its headline. Two need more room.
Screens and paper
Carr’s case that reading on screens is shallower has the most direct tests, and they find a small cost for screens.
A 2018 meta-analysis of 54 studies from 2000 to 2017 found a small advantage for paper. It was larger when reading was timed, appeared with informational texts but not with stories, and grew over the years.
A 2019 meta-analysis of 33 experiments found much the same. Reading from screens did slightly worse for expository texts, with no difference for narrative ones and no reliable difference in reading time. Readers on paper were also better at judging how well they had understood.
That supports a narrower version of Carr’s claim: for some kinds of reading, the screen costs a little.
Is the internet making us shallower?
Here the evidence is unsettled.
The brain-scan research behind the book’s “five hours” passage was small. The published 2009 study scanned 24 older adults once and called itself exploratory. The training follow-up was presented at a 2010 scientific meeting. Small’s group reads the extra activity in experienced searchers as a sign that searching is mentally stimulating.
Two reviews give a mixed picture:
- A 2019 review in World Psychiatry found that the internet can produce both short-term and lasting changes in attention, memory and social thinking. It called the effects on young people’s development a priority for future research.
- A 2017 review of smartphone research called the field “still limited” and said that in some areas it was “not yet mature enough to endorse any firm conclusions”.
The book also cites a 2009 Stanford study that found heavy multitaskers “much more easily distracted”. Since then, research on heavy media multitaskers has found a small to moderate link to poorer attention. The studies compare groups, though, and do not show cause. Our Deep Work summary covers those studies in detail.
Our reading: there is some evidence of modest effects on attention and reading habits. The larger claim, that the web is making us worse thinkers, is not settled.
How to use it
These practices come from findings that held up, or held up in part. They describe what some people do; what fits your reading is your call.
- Paper for the hard reading. The paper advantage showed up for informational texts and grew under time pressure. Some people print, or switch to paper, for the reports and papers they need to understand well.
- Checking your own understanding on screen. Readers judged their understanding less accurately on screens. Some people pause after reading something important on a screen and summarise it before moving on.
- Reading past the skim. People typically read only a fraction of the words on a web page. Some readers, before sharing or acting on an article, go back and read it through.
- Writing for skimmers. The same finding cuts the other way for writers. Some writers put the main point first, so a skimming reader still meets it.
Behind most of these is the book’s first idea: the form a text arrives in can change what a reader takes from it.
Who it’s for, and who can skip it
It suits readers who have felt their attention change and want a thoughtful, well-written account of why that might be.
It is an argument, not a review of the evidence. It draws on research to make its case, and some of that research is small or early. Readers who mainly want the science of screen reading may get more from the studies in the cheat sheet.
If you liked this
- Digital Minimalism, summarised: Cal Newport’s method for choosing which technologies to keep, with its research checked.
- Amusing Ourselves to Death, summarised: Neil Postman’s earlier argument that a medium shapes what can be said through it.
- Information Is Power: how to choose what you feed your mind, with The Shallows in its reading list.
Sources
- N. Carr, The Shallows (W. W. Norton, 2010; paperback 2011; 10th-anniversary edition 2020): short passages confirmed through Open Library search-inside of the 2011 Norton paperback and the Atlantic Books edition; publisher’s page; Open Library record of the 2010 edition; N. Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, The Atlantic (July/August 2008).
- Plato, Phaedrus, tr. B. Jowett, Project Gutenberg.
- E. A. Maguire et al., “Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers”, PNAS (2000).
- G. W. Small, T. D. Moody, P. Siddarth and S. Y. Bookheimer, “Your brain on Google”, American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry (2009); G. W. Small et al., “Brain health consequences of digital technology use”, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience (2020).
- J. Nielsen, “How Little Do Users Read?”, Nielsen Norman Group (2008).
- D. DeStefano and J.-A. LeFevre, “Cognitive load in hypertext reading: A review”, Computers in Human Behavior (2007; online 2005), as quoted in the book; G. Fitzsimmons, M. J. Weal and D. Drieghe, “The impact of hyperlinks on reading text”, PLoS ONE (2019).
- P. Delgado, C. Vargas, R. Ackerman and L. Salmerón, “Don’t throw away your printed books”, Educational Research Review (2018); V. Clinton, “Reading from paper compared to screens”, Journal of Research in Reading (2019).
- J. Firth et al., “The “online brain”: how the Internet may be changing our cognition”, World Psychiatry (2019); H. H. Wilmer, L. E. Sherman and J. M. Chein, “Smartphones and Cognition”, Frontiers in Psychology (2017).
Checked October 2026. What we read: the publisher’s page, Open Library and Internet Archive records, short passages from the 2011 Norton paperback and the Atlantic Books edition (through Open Library’s search-inside, a line or two at a time), the opening of Carr’s 2008 essay, Plato’s Phaedrus in Jowett’s translation, and the studies listed above (their abstracts, and the full text of the 2020 review by Small’s group). We did not read the whole book or the 2020 afterword. If you can show any of this wrong, with a source, write to [email protected].
- book summary
- attention
- reading
- internet
- memory