The Shallows (17 page)

Nielsen’s analysis backed up the conclusions of the German researchers themselves. They had reported that most Web pages are viewed for ten seconds or less. Fewer than one in ten page views extend beyond two minutes, and a significant portion of those seem to involve “unattended browser windows…left open in the background of the desktop.” The researchers observed that “even new pages with plentiful information and many links are regularly viewed only for a brief period.” The results, they said, “confirm that browsing is a rapidly interactive activity.”
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The results also reinforce something that Nielsen wrote in 1997 after his first study of online reading. “How do users read on the web?” he asked then. His succinct answer: “They don’t.”
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Web sites routinely collect detailed data on visitor behavior, and those statistics underscore just how quickly we leap between pages when we’re online. Over a period of two months in 2008, an Israeli company named ClickTale, which supplies software for analyzing how people use corporate Web pages, collected data on the behavior of a million visitors to sites maintained by its clients around the world. It found that in most countries people spend, on average, between nineteen and twenty-seven seconds looking at a page before moving on to the next one, including the time required for the page to load into their browser’s window. German and Canadian surfers spend about twenty seconds on each page, U.S. and U.K. surfers spend about twenty-one seconds, Indians and Australians spend about twenty-four seconds, and the French spend about twenty-five seconds.
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On the Web, there is no such thing as leisurely browsing. We want to gather as much information as quickly as our eyes and fingers can move.

That’s true even when it comes to academic research. As part of a five-year study that ended in early 2008, a group from University College London examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium. Both sites provided users with access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. The scholars found that people using the sites exhibited a distinctive “form of skimming activity” in which they’d hop quickly from one source to another, rarely returning to any source they had already visited. They’d typically read, at most, one or two pages of an article or book before “bouncing out” to another site. “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense,” the authors of the study reported; “indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”
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The shift in our approach to reading and research seems to be an inevitable consequence of our reliance on the technology of the Net, argues Merzenich, and it bespeaks a deeper change in our thinking. “There is absolutely no question that modern search engines and cross-referenced websites have powerfully enabled research and communication efficiencies,” he says. “There is also absolutely no question that our brains are engaged less directly and more shallowly in the synthesis of information when we use research strategies that are all about ‘efficiency,’ ‘secondary (and out-of-context) referencing,’ and ‘once over, lightly.’”
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The switch from reading to power-browsing is happening very quickly. Already, reports Ziming Liu, a library science professor at San José State University, “the advent of digital media and the growing collection of digital documents have had a profound impact on reading.” In 2003, Liu surveyed 113 well-educated people—engineers, scientists, accountants, teachers, business managers, and graduate students, mainly between thirty and forty-five years old—to gauge how their reading habits had changed over the preceding ten years. Nearly eighty-five percent of the people reported that they were spending more time reading electronic documents. When asked to characterize how their reading practices have changed, eighty-one percent said that they were spending more time “browsing and scanning,” and eighty-two percent reported that they were doing more “non-linear reading.” Only twenty-seven percent said that the time they devoted to “in-depth reading” was on the rise, while forty-five percent said it was declining. Just sixteen percent said they were giving more “sustained attention” to reading; fifty percent said they were giving it less “sustained attention.”

The findings, said Liu, indicate that “the digital environment tends to encourage people to explore many topics extensively, but at a more superficial level,” and that “hyperlinks distract people from reading and thinking deeply.” One of the participants in the study told Liu, “I find that my patience with reading long documents is decreasing. I want to skip ahead to the end of long articles.” Another said, “I skim much more [when reading] html pages than I do with printed materials.” It’s quite clear, Liu concluded, that with the flood of digital text pouring through our computers and phones, “people are spending more time on reading” than they used to. But it’s equally clear that it’s a very different kind of reading. A “screen-based reading behavior is emerging,” he wrote, which is characterized by “browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one-time reading, [and] non-linear reading.” The time “spent on in-depth reading and concentrated reading” is, on the other hand, falling steadily.
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There’s nothing wrong with browsing and scanning, or even power-browsing and power-scanning. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines in order to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to skim text is every bit as important as the ability to read deeply. What is different, and troubling, is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for deeper study, scanning is becoming an end in itself—our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts. We’ve reached the point where a Rhodes Scholar like Florida State’s Joe O’Shea—a philosophy major, no less—is comfortable admitting not only that he doesn’t read books but that he doesn’t see any particular need to read them. Why bother, when you can Google the bits and pieces you need in a fraction of a second? What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.

THERE ARE COMPENSATIONS.
Research shows that certain cognitive skills are strengthened, sometimes substantially, by our use of computers and the Net. These tend to involve lower-level, or more primitive, mental functions such as hand-eye coordination, reflex response, and the processing of visual cues. One much-cited study of video gaming, published in
Nature
in 2003, revealed that after just ten days of playing action games on computers, a group of young people had significantly increased the speed with which they could shift their visual focus among different images and tasks. Veteran game players were also found to be able to identify more items in their visual field than novices could. The authors of the study concluded that “although video-game playing may seem to be rather mindless, it is capable of radically altering visual attentional processing.”
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While experimental evidence is sparse, it seems only logical that Web searching and browsing would also strengthen brain functions related to certain kinds of fast-paced problem solving, particularly those involving the recognition of patterns in a welter of data. Through the repetitive evaluation of links, headlines, text snippets, and images, we should become more adept at quickly distinguishing among competing informational cues, analyzing their salient characteristics, and judging whether they’ll have practical benefit for whatever task we’re engaged in or goal we’re pursuing. One British study of the way women search for medical information online indicated that the speed with which they were able to assess the probable value of a Web page increased as they gained familiarity with the Net.
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It took an experienced browser only a few seconds to make an accurate judgment about whether a page was likely to have trustworthy information.

Other studies suggest that the kind of mental calisthenics we engage in online may lead to a small expansion in the capacity of our working memory.
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That, too, would help us to become more adept at juggling data. Such research “indicates that our brains learn to swiftly focus attention, analyze information, and almost instantaneously decide on a go or no-go decision,” says Gary Small. He believes that as we spend more time navigating the vast quantity of information available online, “many of us are developing neural circuitry that is customized for rapid and incisive spurts of directed attention.”
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As we practice browsing, surfing, scanning, and multitasking, our plastic brains may well become more facile at those tasks.

The importance of such skills shouldn’t be taken lightly. As our work and social lives come to center on the use of electronic media, the faster we’re able to navigate those media and the more adroitly we’re able to shift our attention among online tasks, the more valuable we’re likely to become as employees and even as friends and colleagues. As the writer Sam Anderson put it in “In Defense of Distraction,” a 2009 article in
New York
magazine, “Our jobs depend on connectivity” and “our pleasure-cycles—no trivial matter—are increasingly tied to it.” The practical benefits of Web use are many, which is one of the main reasons we spend so much time online. “It’s too late,” argues Anderson, “to just retreat to a quieter time.”
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He’s right, but it would be a serious mistake to look narrowly at the Net’s benefits and conclude that the technology is making us more intelligent. Jordan Grafman, head of the cognitive neuroscience unit at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explains that the constant shifting of our attention when we’re online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking, but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively. “Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning—that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness? The answer is, in more cases than not, no,” says Grafman. “The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem.” You become, he argues, more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.
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David Meyer, a University of Michigan neuroscientist and one of the leading experts on multitasking, makes a similar point. As we gain more experience in rapidly shifting our attention, we may “overcome some of the inefficiencies” inherent in multitasking, he says, “but except in rare circumstances, you can train until you’re blue in the face and you’d never be as good as if you just focused on one thing at a time.”
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What we’re doing when we multitask “is learning to be skillful at a superficial level.”
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The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best two thousand years ago: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”
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In an article published in
Science
in early 2009, Patricia Greenfield, a prominent developmental psychologist who teaches at UCLA, reviewed more than fifty studies of the effects of different types of media on people’s intelligence and learning ability. She concluded that “every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others.” Our growing use of the Net and other screen-based technologies has led to the “widespread and sophisticated development of visual-spatial skills.” We can, for example, rotate objects in our minds better than we used to be able to. But our “new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence” go hand in hand with a weakening of our capacities for the kind of “deep processing” that underpins “mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.”
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The Net is making us smarter, in other words, only if we define intelligence by the Net’s own standards. If we take a broader and more traditional view of intelligence—if we think about the depth of our thought rather than just its speed—we have to come to a different and considerably darker conclusion.

Given our brain’s plasticity, we know that our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our synapses when we’re not online. We can assume that the neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are expanding and strengthening, while those used for reading and thinking deeply, with sustained concentration, are weakening or eroding. In 2009, researchers from Stanford University found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light multitaskers. They found that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted by “irrelevant environmental stimuli,” had significantly less control over the contents of their working memory, and were in general much less able to maintain their concentration on a particular task. Whereas the infrequent multitaskers exhibited relatively strong “top-down attentional control,” the habitual multitaskers showed “a greater tendency for bottom-up attentional control,” suggesting that “they may be sacrificing performance on the primary task to let in other sources of information.” Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” commented Clifford Nass, the Stanford professor who led the research. “Everything distracts them.”
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Michael Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment. As we multitask online, he says, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.” The consequences for our intellectual lives may prove “deadly.”
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