They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest… I can’t get my students to read whole books anymore…” (318). Students are not focusing on reading a book from beginning to end. Instead, students tend to skim through and miss the important information which is a negative impact on them. Carr agrees that using the Web so often is having a negative effect on him because he is having a harder time focusing and reading articles which are more than a few sentences. He points out, “When I mentions my troubles with reading to friends, many say they’re suffering from similar afflictions.
Carr said that “ People who are continually distracted by emails, alerts and other messages understand less than who are able to concentrate.” (qtd line 9). I agree with that the net slowly damages our brains. For example, my friend who spends a lot of time to do nothing important things on the internet, can’t deeply focus on one thing. When we together read a book, she can’t focus her mind only in the book. She gets easily bored and tries to do something different thing when she reads books.
His primary arguments seemed to be examples of his own difficulties. He states “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy…That’s rarely the case anymore.” He continues to write of how his mind starts to wander after a few pages, and he looks for something else to do; reading has become a struggle. Carr says the culprit is the Internet itself, basing his accusation on how in today’s society we can obtain information after just a few minutes on the Net. The media today has started to give us information in as limited amount of words they can allow, so we as users can skim the information we desire then move onto the next sliver of info. He believes our minds have been altered to expect all information the way the Net hands it out: “in a swiftly stream of moving particles,” as he put it.
Is Technology Making us Stupid? Nicholas Carr the author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” writes on the effects of technology upon our culture and economy, he has published many periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, The Financial Times, Die Zeit, The Futurist, and Advertising Age. Also, he is the author of two-thousand eights bestseller for his book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. You might consider the not only the title question, but also your own practices of interacting with information, and weather technological applications like Google are changing what it means to think and be human. Does technology advance our abilities, or does it, as Carr suggest, flatten our own intelligence into artificial intelligence?
In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, the author, Nicholas Carr gives an in-depth description of the advances in technology and what effect these advancements have done to our society. Carr gives examples of the effects of several different types of modern technology but concentrates mostly on the effects of the Internet. This book is particularly persuasive in the way Carr argues and backs his idea with personal experience and opinions. In this paper, I will apply Carr’s idea of the Internet as a medium way people read and process information to my own experiences as a reader. I will focus, specifically, on my reading process; how it is changed, for better or worse, depending on such things as genre and the impact of the
They can choose to engage in deep thinking activities. Too much of anything is not good for any one, and this also applies to internet usage. Scholars say that the price of technology is alienation and that this indicates that the more distracted an individual becomes, the less able they are to experience human emotions such as empathy and compassion. It is still too early to tell what the results of the future effects of the internet, but as Carr states, “An intellectual technology exerts its influence by shifting the emphasis of our thought. As the brain adapts to the new medium, the most profound changes will take place over several generations’
In a nutshell, the internet has overshadowed our other intellectual technologies. It has becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone and our TV and radio. Internet is stealing the satisfaction of reading. Now, we skim the pages of our books, newspapers and journals for a general idea of the material, instead of reading for insight. Kids find it harder to use the library because it has become more and more difficult to retain concentration
It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone to get hold of your stockbroker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with. That one thing the Internet does, and only that.” * - Tom Wolfe, from Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill in Hooking Up (published in 2000) Established only a few decades ago, the Internet itself is a neutral device originally designed for easing researches and studies among academic and military structures. The Internet is a system of enormous technical and social complexity.
Amongst all this fast-paced world, people would have rather not considered about the immense amount of books available, opting for more conventional methods of obtaining knowledge. This brings us to the second category of factors that resulting in the burning of books , personal emotion. In our current world, many people feel more important than others due to their excessive readings and the knowledge they have obtained from these readings. This results in both jealousy and envy in the people who may not have time or methods to read’/access these books and obtain the knowledge for themselves. The other essential factor present in the book
Carr thinks that excessive use of the internet might cause permanent changes to the way our brains work and we don’t have to remember as much, because we have RAM (Random Access Memory). Carr suggests that due to all the choices and distractions the internet provides its user whilst searching for information, it ‘turns us back to our native state of distractedness’ (Carr 373). Carr feels like due to the constant quick thinking skills that the internet demands us to have; we are losing our higher order cognitive abilities gained from focus reading such as from a book. Our ability to think in a creative and reflective way is diminishing. Carr feels the automatic way of thinking means we are ‘losing our mental discipline’ (Carr 375).