The Shallows (11 page)

The Internet, like the personal computer before it, has proven to be so useful in so many ways that we’ve welcomed every expansion of its scope. Rarely have we paused to ponder, much less question, the media revolution that has been playing out all around us, in our homes, our workplaces, our schools. Until the Net arrived, the history of media had been a tale of fragmentation. Different technologies progressed down different paths, leading to a proliferation of special-purpose tools. Books and newspapers could present text and images, but they couldn’t handle sounds or moving pictures. Visual media like cinema and TV were unsuited to the display of text, except in the smallest of quantities. Radios, telephones, phonographs, and tape players were limited to transmitting sounds. If you wanted to add up numbers, you used a calculator. If you wanted to look up facts, you consulted a set of encyclopedias or a
World Almanac
. The production end of the business was every bit as fragmented as the consumption end. If a company wanted to sell words, it printed them on paper. If it wanted to sell movies, it wound them onto spools of film. If it wanted to sell songs, it pressed them onto vinyl records or recorded them onto magnetic tape. If it wanted to distribute TV shows and commercials, it shot them through the air from a big antenna or sent them down thick black coaxial cables.

Once information is digitized, the boundaries between media dissolve. We replace our special-purpose tools with an all-purpose tool. And because the economics of digital production and distribution are almost always superior to what came before—the cost of creating electronic products and transmitting them through the Net is a small fraction of the cost of manufacturing physical goods and shipping them through warehouses and into stores—the shift happens very quickly, following capitalism’s inexorable logic. Today, nearly all media companies distribute digital versions of their products through the Net, and the growth in the consumption of media goods is taking place almost entirely online.

That doesn’t mean that traditional forms of media have disappeared. We still buy books and subscribe to magazines. We still go to the movies and listen to the radio. Some of us still buy music on CDs and movies on DVDs. A few of us will even pick up a newspaper now and then. When old technologies are supplanted by new ones, the old technologies often continue to be used for a long time, sometimes indefinitely. Decades after the invention of movable type, many books were still being handwritten by scribes or printed from woodblocks—and some of the most beautiful books continue to be produced in those ways today. Quite a few people still listen to vinyl records, use film cameras to take photographs, and look up phone numbers in the printed Yellow Pages. But the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. They become progress’s dead ends. It’s the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people’s behavior and shape their perceptions. That’s why the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDs. It lies in digital files shot through our universal medium at the speed of light.

“A NEW MEDIUM
is never an addition to an old one,” wrote McLuhan in
Understanding Media
, “nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.”
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His observation rings particularly true today. Traditional media, even electronic ones, are being refashioned and repositioned as they go through the shift to online distribution. When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium’s physical form; it injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.

A page of online text viewed through a computer screen may seem similar to a page of printed text. But scrolling or clicking through a Web document involves physical actions and sensory stimuli very different from those involved in holding and turning the pages of a book or a magazine. Research has shown that the cognitive act of reading draws not just on our sense of sight but also on our sense of touch. It’s tactile as well as visual. “All reading,” writes Anne Mangen, a Norwegian literary studies professor, is “multi-sensory.” There’s “a crucial link” between “the sensory-motor experience of the materiality” of a written work and “the cognitive processing of the text content.”
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The shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it.

Hyperlinks also alter our experience of media. Links are in one sense a variation on the textual allusions, citations, and footnotes that have long been common elements of documents. But their effect on us as we read is not at all the same. Links don’t just point us to related or supplemental works; they propel us toward them. They encourage us to dip in and out of a series of texts rather than devote sustained attention to any one of them. Hyperlinks are designed to grab our attention. Their value as navigational tools is inextricable from the distraction they cause.

The searchability of online works also represents a variation on older navigational aids such as tables of contents, indexes, and concordances. But here, too, the effects are different. As with links, the ease and ready availability of searching make it much simpler to jump between digital documents than it ever was to jump between printed ones. Our attachment to any one text becomes more tenuous, more provisional. Searches also lead to the fragmentation of online works. A search engine often draws our attention to a particular snippet of text, a few words or sentences that have strong relevance to whatever we’re searching for at the moment, while providing little incentive for taking in the work as a whole. We don’t see the forest when we search the Web. We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves. As companies like Google and Microsoft perfect search engines for video and audio content, more products are undergoing the fragmentation that already characterizes written works.

By combining many different kinds of information on a single screen, the multimedia Net further fragments content and disrupts our concentration. A single Web page may contain a few chunks of text, a video or audio stream, a set of navigational tools, various advertisements, and several small software applications, or “widgets,” running in their own windows. We all know how distracting this cacophony of stimuli can be. We joke about it all the time. A new e-mail message announces its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. A few seconds later, our RSS reader tells us that one of our favorite bloggers has uploaded a new post. A moment after that, our mobile phone plays the ringtone that signals an incoming text message. Simultaneously, a Facebook or Twitter alert blinks on-screen. In addition to everything flowing through the network, we also have immediate access to all the other software programs running on our computers—they, too, compete for a piece of our mind. Whenever we turn on our computer, we are plunged into an “ecosystem of interruption technologies,” as the blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow terms it.
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Interactivity, hyperlinking, searchability, multimedia—all these qualities of the Net bring attractive benefits. Along with the unprecedented volume of information available online, they’re the main reasons that most of us are drawn to using the Net so much. We like to be able to switch between reading and listening and watching without having to get up and turn on another appliance or dig through a pile of magazines or disks. We like to be able to find and be transported instantly to relevant data—without having to sort through lots of extraneous stuff. We like to be in touch with friends, family members, and colleagues. We like to feel connected—and we hate to feel disconnected. The Internet doesn’t change our intellectual habits against our will. But change them it does.

Our use of the Net will only grow, and its impact on us will only strengthen, as it becomes ever more present in our lives. Like the clock and the book before it, the computer continues to get smaller and cheaper as technology advances. Inexpensive laptops gave us the ability to take the Internet with us when we left our office or our home. But the laptop was itself a cumbersome device, and connecting one to the Internet was not always easy. The introduction of the tiny netbook and the even tinier smartphone solves those problems. Powerful pocket-sized computers like the Apple iPhone, the Motorola Droid, and the Google Nexus One come bundled with Internet access. Along with the incorporation of Internet services into everything from car dashboards to televisions to the cabins of airplanes, these small devices promise to more deeply integrate the Web into our everyday activities, making our universal medium all the more universal.

As the Net expands, other media contract. By changing the economics of production and distribution, the Net has cut into the profitability of many news, information, and entertainment businesses, particularly those that have traditionally sold physical products. Sales of music CDs have fallen steadily over the last decade, dropping twenty percent in 2008 alone.
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Sales of movie DVDs, a major recent source of profits for Hollywood studios, are also now in decline, falling six percent during 2008 and then plunging another fourteen percent during the first half of 2009.
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Unit sales of greeting cards and postcards are dropping.
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The volume of mail sent through the U.S. Postal Service declined at its fastest pace ever during 2009.
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Universities are discontinuing the printed editions of scholarly monographs and journals and moving to strictly electronic distribution.
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Public schools are pushing students to use online reference materials in place of what California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refers to as “antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks.”
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Everywhere you look, you see signs of the Net’s growing hegemony over the packaging and flow of information.

Nowhere have the effects been so unsettling as in the newspaper industry, which faces particularly severe financial challenges as readers and advertisers embrace the Net as their medium of choice. The decline in Americans’ newspaper reading began decades ago, when radio and TV began consuming more of peoples’ leisure time, but the Internet has accelerated the trend. Between 2008 and 2009, newspaper circulation dropped more than seven percent, while visits to newspaper Web sites grew by more than ten percent.
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One of America’s oldest dailies, the
Christian Science Monitor
, announced in early 2009 that after a hundred years it was stopping its presses. The Web would become its main channel for distributing news. The move, said the paper’s publisher, Jonathan Wells, was a harbinger of what lay in store for other newspapers. “Changes in the industry—changes in the concept of news and the economics underlying the industry—hit the
Monitor
first,” he explained.
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He was soon proved correct. Within months, Colorado’s oldest newspaper, the
Rocky Mountain News
, had gone out of business; the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
had abandoned its print edition and fired most of its staff; the
Washington Post
had shut down all its U.S. bureaus and let more than a hundred journalists go; and the owners of more than thirty other U.S. newspapers, including the
Los Angeles Times
,
Chicago Tribune
,
Philadelphia Inquirer
, and
Minneapolis Star Tribune
, had filed for bankruptcy. Tim Brooks, the managing director of Guardian News and Media, which publishes
The Guardian
and
The Independent
in Britain, announced that all his company’s future investments would go into multimedia digital products, mainly delivered through its Web sites. “The days when you can trade in just words are gone,” he told an industry conference.
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AS PEOPLE’S MINDS
become attuned to the crazy quilt of Web content, media companies have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Many producers are chopping up their products to fit the shorter attention spans of online consumers, as well as to raise their profiles on search engines. Snippets of TV shows and movies are distributed through YouTube, Hulu, and other video services. Excerpts of radio programs are offered as podcasts or streams. Individual magazine and newspaper articles circulate in isolation. Pages of books are displayed through Amazon.com and Google Book Search. Music albums are split apart, their songs sold through iTunes or streamed through Spotify. Even the songs themselves are broken into pieces, with their riffs and hooks packaged as ringtones for cell phones or embedded in video games. There’s much to be said for what economists call the “unbundling” of content. It provides people with more choices and frees them from unwanted purchases. But it also illustrates and reinforces the changing patterns of media consumption promoted by the Web. As the economist Tyler Cowen says, “When access [to information] is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty.”
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The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edge of a computer screen. Media companies are reshaping their traditional products, even the physical ones, to more closely resemble what people experience when they’re online. If, in the early days of the Web, the design of online publications was inspired by print publications (as the design of Gutenberg’s Bible was inspired by scribal books), today the inspiration tends to go in the opposite direction. Many magazines have tweaked their layouts to mimic or at least echo the look and feel of Web sites. They’ve shortened their articles, introduced capsule summaries, and crowded their pages with easy-to-browse blurbs and captions.
Rolling Stone
, once known for publishing sprawling, adventurous features by writers like Hunter S. Thompson, now eschews such works, offering readers a jumble of short articles and reviews. There was “no Internet,” publisher Jann Wenner explains, “back when
Rolling Stone
was publishing these seven-thousand-word stories.” Most popular magazines have come to be “filled with color, oversized headlines, graphics, photos, and pull quotes,” writes Michael Scherer in the
Columbia Journalism Review
. “The gray text page, once a magazine staple, has been all but banished.”
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