Nicholas Carr is giving voice to these concerns. This article is about one skill that he believes is being eroded, that of reading: "I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose.
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.
[Carr then goes on to inform the reader of how immersed he would get in the text of books and articles.] "That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get
The problems that the author is trying to solve is to get people to become more knowledgeable by reading much more educated novels, and not using the internet databases to quickly find an answer or solution to something. He believes that if the internet was not invented we would have been much more educated than we were a long time ago. I agree that America has become much more sluggish with how we obtain information. The ramifications of today’s society as a “content” driven civilization are that Spending a lot of time online only becomes a problem when it absorbs too much of your time, causing you to neglect your relationships, your work, school, or other important things in your
All the debates offer is an opportunity to see a President laid bare without the constant media spin and give the American public an opportunity to decide what to focus on. Despite this, however, the tradition of debating between presidential candidates has many fans for a number of reasons. One key reason is that Americans are not offered the opportunity to see regular presidential scrutiny unlike the UK where ministers are grilled weekly, therefore this gives the electorate a prime opportunity to see how a candidate deals with pressure and whether they can debate effectively. These debates also offer a rare chance to see true political straight talking – an opportunity so often denied to so many Americans, one common host chooses the topics of the debate in private and allots time rigidly, not allowing the audience to make any noise in reaction to what the candidates say. With methods like these ranting is kept to a minimum and destroys any scent of
Immersing myself in a book, a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.
Even Carr admits when he reads books now, his “concentration often starts to drift after the first two or three pages” (150). It’s important to physically read a book, take a walk, or do something else that allows the mind a rest. We could take crochet lessons, collect coins, and learn a new language. The brain will be able to develop more rather than having a computer determine our hyperactivity. In the end technology will enslave all those who are addicted.
However, Google has a huge amount of information and much of it could be wrong. For example, the Wikipedia website is not a good source of information because normal people write the information in it and not specialists. Therefore, if we get wrong information, then our knowledge would be wrong. Carr also discussed that the Internet is an imaginary world, and all the people are behind the computer screens. Therefore, whenever we access a website, Google can collect more information about us, and if we access more websites, then that would be easier and faster for them to collect the information they want.
“Is Google Making us Stupid?” While the use of the World Wide Web is extensively accessible to people old and young, the use of internet search engines rank high on the top list of accessed sites on the web. While some will argue the resourcefulness of such sites, others would agree that searching within these sites restricts the mind from using its full potential due to ease of access in retrieving data. With data, statistics, facts, media sources, and electronic databases all being available online, information now as people see, is only a click away. Though this poses to be a mere convenience to users, this does not mean people are smarter or more intelligent due to the fact that they can “GOOGLE” terms and find answers to information needed. People, who believe that search engines are great sources for retrieval of information, do not understand the need to acquire knowledge on a more personal level.
Although Johnson and fellow couch potatoes would truly love to believe that watching TV works wonders on your brain, it is surely a fantasy with no relation to real life Johnsons’ main argument is that TV has gotten more complicated over the years and our brains have to compensate for that. The calls this the Sleeper Curve and defines it: “The most debased forms of mass diversion- video games and violent TV dramas and juvenile sitcoms,- turn out to be nutritional after all” (215). More simply put, that even if TV is really bad, it is still a force for good, improving our brains and not making us dumb. Johnson compares what you gain from TV to what you gain from reading: attention, patience, retention, and parsing narrative threads. The complexity of TV places demands on the same cognitive qualities.