Technology Influence on Today’s Society Technology has become an important resource in the world today. Many writers are writing essays about how technology is beneficial and harmful to our society today. In essays, “A Personal Guide to Digital Happiness” by Anna Akbari and “Society is Dead, We Have Retreated to the iWorld,” by Andrew Sullivan, they discuss their views on current technology. Akbari and Sullivan both write about how technology is positive and negative; however, Akbari focuses on mainly the positive ways to better utilize technology, while Sullivan focuses on the negative. A similarity between Sullivan and Akbari is they both recommend the reader to take a sabbatical from technology.
Is Google Making Us Stupid? * I will start off by saying that I do agree with the author in stating that Google is making us (technology driven people) stupid. Modern technology with computers, cell phones and tablets can be credited to allowing us access to the internet. There used to be a time when doing research meant going to the library and checking out a book or encyclopedia and actually looking up the information to be researched. Also there was a time when you had a question, the way to find the answer was to maybe ask an actual human being.
Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr Thesis The author narrates a dialogue of 2001: A space Odyssey to make a contrast with a personal feeling about the impoverishment of his reading skills. He talks the about web advantages and quotes a lot of writers and bloggers to remark he is neither the first nor the only one to notice this issue. Carr finally wants us to remember that google is one of the biggest search engines; it finds information very quickly but also affects our memory and attention. 2001: A space Odyssey and the personal context Carr feels just like the astronaut who is being disconnected of his mind; as a writer and a dedicated reader he accepts to be losing all those skills that one day were only considered common reading habits. Throughout all these years, the net is becoming the universal source of information for most of the people and the way the media is presented gives us a big reading deficiency that is increasing every time.
He has represented the Internet as the answer to all of society's worries. In both these articles both writers provide very convincing evidence weather on how the Internet is making us more brilliant or is it turning us brainless. In Nicholas Carr’s Article “Does the Internet Make You Dumber?” he argues the fact that the Internet indeed does make you “dumber,” almost scaring its reader to stay away from web usage. He takes a more scientific approach talking about how the Internet allows us to have a mass amount of information at any time, but with all that info comes distractions. He goes on about how those distractions hurt our mental thinking.
"Yes, Google is hampering our ability to recall information." (Betsy Sparrow, Columbia University) The study also found that Google improves certain kinds of memory, like methods for retrieving information. Sparrow's findings aren't the whole story, though. As scientists have stressed since the dawn of web, the effects of Internet usage on cognition are pretty complicated. Search engines are rerouting our memory.
On the other hand, others argue the internet promotes and encourages literacy. Is the collective intelligence gained by accessing and using the internet and social media making us a more intellectual society? The answer is found in many skewed viewpoints and opinions. In Nicholas Carr's article in the Wall Street Journal, "does the internet make you dumber", he makes numerous rhetorical appeals to Ethos to establish credibility or the "trust me" appeal. The Ethos appeal of this article produces an appeal towards the author by providing information the author is credible and knowledgeable.
There are many famous people including Bauerlein himself were having an argument with another group of people on whether digital culture is an advantage or not. He backs up his opinion by saying “Together they form an imposing countervailing force, an alliance to slow the headlong rush to technologies learning, reading, writing, and intellectual life.” Bauerlein believes digital culture had cut of young adults’ understanding on literature and history because at this time, young adults would prefer to find answers on the Internet; therefore, reading also becomes a problem. Even though teenagers are willing to adapt the new learning style is an advantage for them; however, they should not abandon the old way of studying. Bauerlein said “If it doesn't happen in high school, in college and in home at this time, it probably never will.” Young adults should be aware of how to study when there aren’t any digital culture provided, on the other
Viehmann English 112 Google: The Fast and Arguable Resource In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” he talks about how he had difficulties researching while reading books and long articles. He discusses on how the Internet effects our thinking, reading, writing, and how our brains react to get used to the new media. Carr attempts to provoke the reader with negative effects that result from Internet use. Carr uses some specific examples, and figures, to demonstrate his point of view on online researching. From Carr's opening paragraph, he gives a rough understanding on his skewed view, comparing Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey to his own personal emotion of becoming mentally disconnected.
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.
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