How Does The Internet Impact Society

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Internet Impact on Society In “Hal and Me” written by Nicholas Carr, Carr discusses how the Internet is impacting each individual that is using the Internet. Carr took his own intellectual journey in 2007 and realized he was experiencing difficulty in focusing on his work. His main concern was the difficulty he was having particularly on careful and concentrated reading, thinking about that reading, and writing carefully about it. Carr made a conclusion that the Internet itself was impacting his ability to concentrate and something had to change. In “Hal and Me”, Carr uses examples and personal experiences to relate to the positive and negative impacts the Web has on society in general. First, the Web has advantages and a positive impact…show more content…
Teachers and professors think the Web is great to a certain point though. Teachers have noticed students are carried away by the Web because they are focusing less on reading. Carr agrees, “…. They don’t necessarily read a page from left to right and from top to bottom. 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. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing” (315). Even though he thought he was the only one suffering from no longer having the ability to read at his former level, he learned that his friends were also having trouble. Carr continues explaining how some have totally lost the ability to read and absorb long articles on the Web or in print (316). He says how some are having a difficult time and will not read more than three or four paragraphs because it is “too much” and they will skim…show more content…
He compares and contrasts how his life was with the Web and without it. For example, “Just as Microsoft Word had turned me into a flesh-and-blood word processor, the Internet, I sensed, was turning me into something like a high-speed data-processing machine, a human HAL (325). The Web has changed him in such a way that he felt like a machine. He wanted to stay connected, therefore, he would yearn to check his e-mail, click links, or explore on Google. He noticed the Net was having a much stronger influence over him than his PC ever had (324). Carr does not say if it is positive or negative that the Net was having such a strong influence on him. Like it or not, the Web has made such an impact on society that Carr concludes, “What’s clear though, is that for society as a whole the Net has become, in just twenty years since the software programmer Tim Berners- Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web, the communication and information medium of choice… by choice or necessity, we’ve embraced the Net’s uniquely rapid-fire mode of collecting and dispensing information” (318). It does not matter if one uses the Web as a want or need, the Web has become the communication and information medium of choice. Carr discusses the disadvantages and advantages, but feels ambivalent and does not feel strongly for or against the Web. Yes, the Web has its advantages and disadvantages, but it will always be there.
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