Review of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows (reviewer, Jim Holt) in the London Review of Books: ‘The net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves and conversing with others,’ but it ‘also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.’

A thoughtful review of points brought up by Carr- reading's slow immersion in the medium, the brain's flexibility, the unpredictable relationships between memory and creativity, etc.

Carr (the erstwhile author of 'is Google Making us Stupid') argues that internet technologies have a deleterious effect on us because, as we ascribe more of our memory and recall to the web, the kinds of unconscious reworking of material that informs creativity when we remember things ourselves goes underfed. We end up making connections only at the conscious point of recall.

I'm not sure that I agree with Carr but he makes an interesting point, one that jibes with concerns about information literacy. There's nothing wrong with search being easy, but when it comes at the cost of reflection, we are right to feel concern.

Incidentally, I think that the same students who alarm their tutors by googling everything may not always simply be lazy, but are employing the most apt strategy for garnering information quickly. Although tutors may set up difficulties for this process by requiring certain sorts of outcomes (so many journals, so many monographs, evidence of reflection) I wonder, (in a fairly uninformed way) whether the anxieties of modern pedagogy are getting in its own way. There's no time for reflection because of all the hoops one jumps through. If I am presented with a modest number of set texts I will probably read around them. And I will deserve merit for doing so, in contrast to those who will not. When I have too much to read, too much to find, I will use every dirty trick of search I have learned in over a decade of library service. I will not only use Google for initial leads, I will use 'find' on pages, and Google books and Amazon act as comprehensive indexes to books I hold in my hand to help me skim for relevant passages.

I would agree that I would be impoverished in comparison to someone who had the time to read and inwardly digest the full texts, but one is forced to these strategies by the demands placed on readers today, not least of which is that of time spent at work. When I read Tara Brabazon noting the connection between greater number of hours spent making an income (to pay for one's education) and the corresponding likelihood of not doing as well academically, I agreed wholeheartedly. But I don't blame the student for working. They have to. It will be rightly said that those who wish to achieve will put the extra hours in, but there are after all only so many hours in the day. And if the Black Ops of illegally-mediated search can help the student get to the material quicker, isn't that a useful skill?

I repeat, though, that I would agree that the price to be paid in lack of reflection, and in opportunities to better acquaint oneself with skills in assessing the quality of resources, is a high one. These skills require time more than anything though. If the time is given, it will be filled, either with laziness or with scholarship. Perhaps it is for the student to decide which.