Is Google Making Us Stupid

875 Words4 Pages
What is the Internet Doing to Our Brains? During the occasional instances of downtime during our busy day, the thought of reading a book is just not something that comes to mind for most. Our attention is quickly shifted by the many interruptions of life, be it a notification from our smartphones or a new email we need to check. Many different forms of media compete for our attention all day long and we are living in a continuous state of distraction during this Internet dominated era. Do we really even have the focus and dedication to sit and read a traditional book anymore? The Internet is a splendid addition to our society but we are allowing ourselves to depend on it fully and ultimately permit this technology to affect our mental health. Contrary to the many ways technology has benefited us, it can be harmful for our brains by hindering our concentration, promoting our inability to focus, and causing us to neglect deep thinking. Being distracted is not something new, although it is more frequent now causing us to live in a perpetual state of interruption thus weakening our ability to concentrate. We are just as busy in our offline lives as we are on the Internet. For example, before the Internet and smartphones, a regular landline telephone had an extremely long cord enabling us to multitask and do other things while having phone conversations. Additionally, the pages of a book only have text on it, while internet pages have advertisements, pictures, colors, sounds and moving images to distract our minds from concentrating fully. This constant interruption we have come to know with the use of the Web is lessening our ability to fixate on one thing at a time. Something else that is new to us is how quickly scanning and surfing through short passages of text from multiple sources has become the norm for absorbing information these days. What is
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