The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember product reviews

For those sci-fi fans out there who are also Trekkies, "We are become as the Binars!" For those without the background to understand, here's a quick primer: The race of entities that create the supercomputers that run the Star Trwek starships are called the Binars. They are so enmeshed with their technology that when the master computer on their homeworld begins to fail, they hijack the USS Enterprise in order to 'borrow' the processing capabilities of the ships computer long enough to allow them time to repair the master computer and save their race.

The Binars' very mental architecture has evolved over the millenia that it can no longer fit in the organic brain alone - and needs to be partly virtualised... without it, they die. Their autonomic systems - the 'automatic brain' that contyrols their physical body is now entirely in the machine realm, leaving their entire brain structure for cognitive thought. This book highlights some of the early, but far less extreme, signs that we may be heading the same way.

In the days before internet, when TV was new and the radio was still the first thing you thought of when someone said "wireless", we were required to carry our knowledge in our heads. Being able to confront an unknown situation meant having a wide and varied knowledge base at our immediate grasp, and the ability to think our way through how best to use what was available at the time - the ultimate MacGyver. Nowdays, all you need is a cellphopne with 3G and a few dollars to pay for the data transfer. Why 'know' anything, when everything is just a few clicks away? And after you have used that knowledge, why store it, when it's already stored online where youm can find it again whenever you need it?

These days, to be 'intelligent' requires only that you know what to type into Google, and the dexterity to click a few links.

This book shows us that we are becoming too reliant on our 'information superhighway' technology - generation by generation, we are losing the abilty to think for ourselves, store useful knowledge and experience, and become little more than drones. However, what this book does NOT do, is tell us that the technology is evil, irreparably harmful, or unnecessary. It's merely a beacon, warning us of the shallows we are wallowing towards. If we are to save ourselves from a potentially lethal flaw - being bound to a technology that is still fragile enough to be made useless by warfare or catastrophic natural disaster (think about how badly affected New Orleans was after the tsunami, where a lack of communication cost more lives) - we need to rely on the internet less, and our brains more. Once the knowledge is in your head, work at keeping it there. Learn from books, hands-on experience, experimentation... all the other ways that raised us to this level and are not so electricity-dependent.

Overall, this book is a wake-up call to the 21st Century - Be aware of the limitations of the technology, and how over-dependence on it could prove dangerous. Be aware of your mental accuity, and work to protect and enhance it. Most of all, be aware of your depth-of-self - your level of interaction with the real world, instead of the shallow world of online society, where 'you' is only screen-deep.