In “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr, we were given his point of view on how the internet is changing the way we use our brain, think, read and remember. The internet has been around for everybody to use for about 20 years. This has changed the world in a variety of ways. People have their own ideas on how the internet has done good or bad for everybody using it. I think that the internet is indeed "making us shallows individuals with little connection to our heart, souls and loved ones”. The internet has become a reliable source for everything we need to know. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net
The social generation has taken over. If you don’t tweet on the daily, receive dozens of instagram likes, or know what the heck Tumblr is, you better get Googling because you’ve been left behind. It’s easy to get caught up in all the likes, retweets, comments, and ratings. We seem to need this sense of validation through numbers. We are never offline, we are permanently logged in. In Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows he searches for the consequences in the power of technology.
Advancements in technology have strived to make life easier for so many people. In most cases, the advancements have achieved its goal, but in the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr questions if the improvements in society have unintentionally hindered our thought process overall. Carr begins the article by providing personal instances when his concentration seemed to diminish due to the internet. He explains how he now loses interest when reading lengthy portions, his mind just can’t seem to remain connected to his readings. He then proceeds to talk about how today’s life is surrounded by the internet, and explains the pros and cons of it. The negative side of it is that his mind now wonders off when seeking information from
Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print.
With the rise of technology and the staggering availability of information, the digital age has come about in full force, and will only grow from here. Any individual with an internet connection has a vast amount of knowledge at his fingertips. As long as one is online, he is mere clicks away from Wikipedia or Google, which allows him to find what he needs to know. Despite this, Nicholas Carr questions whether Google has a positive impact on the way people take in information. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr explores the internet’s impact on the way people read. He argues that the availability of so much information has diminished the ability to concentrate on reading, referencing stories of literary types who no longer have the capacity to sit down and read a book, as well as his own personal experiences with this issue. The internet presents tons of data at once, and it is Carr’s assumption that our brains will slowly become wired to better receive this information.
I’m scrolling through the articles on Snapchat and find my way across one with an intriguing title, I instantly tap on it. I begin to scroll further down only to find myself going through extensive paragraphs of information and suddenly this article that seemed so interesting became a bore. In Nicholas G. Carr’s novel, The Shallows, he argues the internet is creating more problems to us humans than actual benefits. Our social skills are starting to lack and our interaction with technology is beginning to heighten. Humans contemplative skills are slowly fading away due to our reliance on the internet to solve our problems. Technology is inevitable by humans, seeing that individuals use it in their everyday lives. Unfortunately, this is a problem considering the use of high-tech gadgets decrease in one’s capacity for concentration, contemplation, and personal memory.
Atlantic journalist Nicholas Carr confesses that he feels something has been “tinkering with his brain.” The internet, he fears, may be messing with our minds. We have lost the ability to focus on a simple task, and memory retention is steadily declining. He is worried about the effect the internet has on the human brain, and where it may take us in the future. In response to this article, Jamais Cascio, also a journalist for the Atlantic, provides his stance on the issue. He argues that this different way of thinking is an adaptation derived from our environment. Ultimately, he thinks that this staccato way of thinking is simply a natural evolution, one that will help to advance the human race.
In The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, Carr argues that technology negatively effects the way humans think and function. He believes that technology can reprogram the memory, mind, and concentration due to his personal experiences, as well as supporting evidence from research studies. In addition, he discusses the “plasticity” of the human brain, reading hardcopy vs. online, writing, and the detrimental effects of the internet on the brain. In the book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that technology promotes superficial reading, alters the way individuals think, and stimulates cursory learning.
The internet damages us, people have lost their ability to read full articles and don’t fully understand what they read and because of this,our natural intelligence will never be the same with the internet around, thinking for us.
Carr explains how the internet can distract us making it harder to focus on tasks. He explains how processing information has become harder. Notifications, ads, popups can make it difficult if you are trying to read an article or book (Carr 57). The internet has become the center of our attention (Carr 57). Carr is explaining how this is the reason why we are struggling to comprehend a certain piece of information. He adds in his article that scientists, researchers and educators have also noticed the difference in concentration. And in further detail, he explains that we fail to see the important information, thus affecting cognition. He says that the information we gather is not valuable unless we know the meaning behind it. Carr concludes with explaining that the more the internet evolves the less valuable information is to
The internet is ever changing, and so our minds, but can the internet mold our minds? Nicholas Carr and Michael Rosenwald support the idea that the reading we do online is making it harder to be able to sit down with a good book. In their papers they discuss the downfalls of using the web. While on the other hand author Clay Shirky challenges that thought in his piece. Shirky directly battles the idea that the internet is damaging our brains by suggesting that internet use can be insightful. In this essay I will evaluate all three articles and expose their strengths and weaknesses then add my own take on the situation.
These two articles are similar in the sense that they agree that the internet and computational objects are reshaping our brain’s structure by changing our neural circuit. By using examples from their personal experiences to identify a trend in technology use, the authors illustrate that the more we bury ourselves in technology the more we are unable to understand material which leads to loss of concentration and the ability to think for ourselves. As an author, Carr finds the internet a beneficial tool, but it’s having a bad effect on his concentration span. Carr points this out by stating “Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy, now I get fidgety, lose the thread and begin looking for something else to do” (39). He is no
In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr disputes that due to new digital tools, peoples’ ability to retain and acquire information has been negatively altered. Even though, we have information at our fingertips, we often don’t take the time to soak in all the information. Carr mentions Bruce Friedman, a blogger, who finds it extremely difficult to read a “longish article on the web” and to try to focus on the importance of the text holistically (Carr 316). This is an issue that many can relate even Carr knows that, “ the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle (Carr 314). Additionally, media theorist Mcluhan describes the net as “chipping away [mental] capacity for concentration and contemplation” (Carr 315). In essences, Carr states that we are having less of an attention span and consequently, less patience for longer articles (Carr 314). Therefore, this affects media outlets such as magazines, newspapers, and other articles, because they must conform and shorten their texts to fit the status quo that people safely enjoy (Carr 321). In addition, the net forces people to be efficient, and so, causes people to “weaken [their] capacity for deep reading” (Carr 317). People are becoming more driven on how quick he or she has to do something rather than think why this text is important. As a consequence, Carr believes that we are starting to lose our ability to be critical readers and
The articles “How Computers Change the Way We Think” by Sherry Turkle and “Electronic Intimacy” by Christine Rosen argue that technology is quite damaging to society as a whole and that even though it can at times be helpful it is more damaging. I have to agree and disagree with this because it really just depends on how it is used and it can damage or help the user.The progressing changes in technology, like social media, can both push us, as a society, further and closer to and from each other and personal connections because it has become a tool that can be manipulated to help or hurt our relationships and us as human beings who are capable of more with and without technology.
The short formats we prefer to read online can therefore influence our thought patterns to be similarly abrupt. When we develop the habit of consuming large volumes of web content, we therefore diminish our “capacity for concentration and contemplation” in favor of processing information at the same rapid pace we receive it digitally (Carr).... ... middle of paper ... ...
Carr writes “media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” We expect to receive information in class or anywhere else like we receive it from the internet. We want that information now and if we cannot have it now then we get bored and find ways to distract ourselves from that boredom.