Business author Nicholas Carr stirs strong emotions in IT circles. When he dared to suggest that “IT doesn’t matter” in a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article back in May 2003 (and a subsequent book), IT executives rushed to publish rebuttals of his central tenet that IT has become so commoditised it has lost its strategic potential. The outcry was such that HBR published a special supplement in its next issue just to accommodate the 15 pages of letters from outraged IT luminaries.

Carr’s latest thesis is again raising hackles, especially among social media evangelists. The Shallows explores how using the internet is literally changing the way we think. Just as other repetitive activities – reading, driving, even watching TV – have a direct impact on the neurology of the brain, the internet is re-wiring our thought processes and behaviour.

But the nature of the internet experience, its frequency (around 30-40% of all leisure time is now spent online), its intensity and its interactive form, make the web a much stronger and more rapid influence on the “plasticity” of the brain – indeed, a perfect environment for “the promotion of cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning,” according to Carr.

On the positive side, that means we are all developing an ability to assimilate information faster, to be natural multi-taskers and networked (as opposed to linear) thinkers. But the re-wiring has a serious downside too: an increased inability to focus and concentrate, and decreased memory power through a reliance on stored, searchable information. Individual and social concerns aside, that change in thinking and behaviour raises all kinds of questions for both commercial and public organisations.

“The danger is that businesses begin to see that kind of highly wired, highly collaborative, perpetually distracted mode of working and thinking as being the only mode that needs to be encouraged – that they confuse a picture of lots of apparent activity with high levels of productivity and creativity,” says Carr.

The concern is that organisations will lose sight of the fact that there are benefits to attentive thinking. “I feel that that activity, and even the appreciation of the benefits of that activity, is getting squeezed out as businesses increasingly judge people based on their ability to process lots of information and messages very quickly.”

The upshot: an erosion of the quality of decision-making, innovative thinking and problem-solving. He describes the experience of a technology company he visited recently. Its executives have started to encounter problems with software developers who are increasingly unable to complete projects. “When programmers hit an obstacle in a particular project, they now tend to move on to another aspect of the project very quickly rather than struggling to overcome the obstacle. As a result, they are engaging in lots of different tasks, never tackling the hardest ones because their focus shifts so easily.”

Deep thought

What such companies are also seeing is that shallow, skimmed understanding is no substitute for original thinking. “There are certainly times when we just want to collect and get the gist of as much information as possible, as quickly as possible. [Googling a subject] informs us about the conventional wisdom on that subject, but in order to challenge conventional wisdom you need to back away from the information-gathering task. In the past, there was always an understanding that gathering information was only the first step in a richer intellectual understanding.

“The second phase was thinking deeply about the information, something that means shielding yourself from distractions. And technology seems to be pushing us to lose sight of that second, very important aspect of intelligence, and to focus entirely on the speed with which we can gather relevant information.”

In Carr’s – distinctly fatalistic – view, technology people are already convincing themselves that being perpetually distracted and constantly juggling information and tasks is not such a bad thing.

“Technology not only reshapes what we do and how we think, it reshapes attitudes, and behaviour. So we start to value only the things that the technology encourages and to tell ourselves, ‘What we’ve lost wasn’t really that important because we’re still moving forward.’ There simply hasn’t been enough scepticism of that view.”

Do you agree with Carr? Have your say by commenting below. And for a more positive view on the impact of the internet, see our interview with net guru Clay Shirky.

Photograph: Pål Hansen