The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

669 Words3 Pages
Nicholas Carr says, in his book, The Shallows, that because of his constant use of computers and the Internet, he has become unable to concentrate on one thing for long periods of time. He can no longer read books without losing interest in them after a few short pages. He doesn’t understand things at great depth, he looks for the shallow understanding of many things. I agree with what Carr said about what using the internet and technology has done to our ability to concentrate and focus on one thing and to read a book and understand things at a deeper level. Since using the Internet, I have noticed that when I look through magazines, I LOOK through them not read them. I scan the stories I find interesting, I read the captions on the pictures instead of reading the whole story. When reading movie reviews, I look for the synopsis not the full summary, not because I don’t want a spoiler alert but because I don’t wasn’t to read the whole thing. Using the computer, I usually will have multiple tabs open and will go between them and not do one thing at a time. And now I find it hard to focus on one subject at a time. I will start writing an essay then get bored and do my math homework. I take way more breaks now than I ever did before. Now, do I think this is a rewiring of our brains? Yes, I do. But I believe that this rewiring can be undone and switched back and forth. I like to think of the “rewiring” as a broken bone that has been in a cast. When you first get the cast off, the arm, leg, etc. is sore and almost unusable at first. But you stretch it and use it a little more everyday until it becomes the same as it used to be. This is the rewiring on our brains. We “broke” (not implying that the use of internet breaks our brains, just a word to fit the analogy) our minds away from the way we originally thought (the offline way of thinking) and started using different

More about The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

Open Document