I’m your only friend

I’m not your only friend

But I’m a little glowing

friend

But really I’m not actually

your friend

– They Might Be Giants

The song is about a nightlight, but it might just as well be about a smart phone, that little glowing friend so many of us thumb lovingly all day and sleep next to at night.

Are our iPhones and BlackBerrys and Droids – and their larger brethren, iPads and netbooks and notebooks – really our friends? Or are they false (if sometimes useful) friends, as the technology writer Nicholas Carr argues?

In “The Shallows,” which builds off his rather alarming 2008 Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he attempts to explain what he sees as the brain-corroding side effects of our digital devices. To make the case that the Net is scrambling our neurons and eviscerating our ability to think long and clearly about anything, Carr draws on studies of neuroplasticity and the sweep of human intellectual and technical history from Socrates through Gutenberg to Marshall McLuhan.

The hyperconnected mediasphere that Carr knows so well has been blogging and op-ed’ing “The Shallows” to death for some time now. You could say the book has hit a wired nerve, with tech and consciousness gurus such as Steven Johnson and Steven Pinker weighing in to defend the creative possibilities of the wired life in the New York Times and elsewhere. The ultimate anti-Carr is probably Clay Shirky, whose new book, “Cognitive Surplus,” sees promise where “The Shallows” sees peril. So who’s right?

Carr leads with what may be his most persuasive evidence: a feeling that something has changed inside his head since he made the jump online. He acknowledges the usefulness of the Internet as a conduit of information and a means of doing research. But he has come to feel there’s a price to pay for that convenience.

He feels this most strongly when he attempts to read a book or an essay that requires sustained focus. Goodbye, deep reading and linear thinking; hello, computer-induced ADD.

Beyond that astute diagnosis of what nags at many of us as we trudge through our digital rounds, Carr manages to be scary and yet not quite persuasive. He leans on summaries of recent research into what happens to our brains (and the brains of monkeys and sea slugs) in response to repeated actions like those we perform when we’re cycling through e-mail and Web sites.

One of the biggest problems with Carr’s argument is that he writes as if the entire world is living glued to its screens, but the truth is that many of us, even those in affluent Western countries, do not live our lives entirely online. A journalist who writes about technology and society is going to spend much of his waking time basting in the electronic juices of the Internet. Maybe American teens text too much, but not everyone is a tech jockey who lines up at the Apple store for the latest Steve Jobs dream gadget.

What about the guy who drives a delivery truck, the woman who sells you stamps at the post office, the mechanic, the farmer, the factory-floor worker, the insurance salesman, the homeless guy at the local public library? They may have computer access, but they are not all leading lives bathed in the glow of an iPad or a BlackBerry.

Beyond the borders of the developed world, cell phones may now be more or less ubiquitous, but Internet access is not – at least not yet. So when Carr talks about a new modern brain whose neural landscape is being dramatically reshaped by all our time online, he’s not really talking about all or even most of humanity but about a relatively elite segment of the planet’s population. Ditto for his worries about what’s happened to our ability to absorb long, sustained arguments. It’s a real problem for those of us who spend our days gazing into screens, but one suspects that deep reading has always been a rare skill.

Another viewpoint

The other thing missing from Carr’s argument is what, exactly, those of us who are over-users of the Internet ought to do about it. Recycle the iPhone? Give the laptop to the poor? That’s where William Powers’ book “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” has more to say. It’s less ambitious, more cheerful and ultimately more persuasive than “The Shallows.”

Powers, a former staff writer for the Washington Post, shares Carr’s feeling that the “caffeinated click-click-click of the mind” has disconnected many people from life’s richer intangibles – what we used to call an inner life. Like Carr, Powers discovers that he misses the possibilities and creative insights that come from reflection, and he describes a powerful need to step out of the digital stream now and again.

For tips on how to deal with today’s digitally enhanced neural overload, he turns for advice and inspiration to seven heavy hitters from history and literature: Plato, Seneca, Gutenberg, Hamlet, Franklin, Thoreau and McLuhan.

The title “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” comes from the Elizabethan equivalent of today’s handheld devices: tables, “pocket-sized almanacs or calendars that came with blank pages made of specially coated paper or parchment.” Notes could be scribbled on those pages with a stylus and later erased; Hamlet mentions them in the play. To Powers, the table is an example of a then-new technology that made the most of an older one – handwriting – to help users manage the early-modern equivalent of information overload.

The principle Powers draws from Hamlet’s handheld is “Old tools fight overload.” In his case, he turned to Moleskine notebooks to help him organize and focus his thoughts offline. From Plato he takes the lesson of occasionally putting distance between oneself and the madding crowd. In one of his dialogues, Plato has Socrates and his young friend Phaedrus take a walk outside Athens, where in the calmer, less distracting countryside they talk about love and rhetoric. (Powers observes that Socrates, apparently an early technophobe, has his doubts about writing versus speech as the best vehicle for thought.) Seneca offers lessons in how to find some inner space in which to focus; Franklin presents a model of how to manage one’s time and attention – and so on down through the ages.

There’s more than a little comfort to be had from looking back and seeing that people did manage to cope with the new technologies that came their way, whether it was writing or printing or the telegraph of Thoreau’s time.

For those who feel they really can’t live without their little glowing friends, Powers suggests it’s possible to be connected to the digital world and to something deeper as well. For his family, that means going offline on weekends. In “The Shallows,” Carr insists that McLuhan was right and that the new digital medium really is the message – that it doesn’t just deliver content but, more and more, determines who we are and how we think. Powers, however, makes a stronger case that it’s still up to us to decide how best to live in, and sometimes apart from, this medium we have created.