More handpicked essays just for you.
How technology effect the human mind
The effects of the internet and television
How television influences the viewer
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: How technology effect the human mind
As the book Amusing Ourselves To Death, discusses some of McLuhan’s ideology on technology by extending our thoughts would impact us through the Internet today is an “extension of the body,” as the internet has changed the way we think and the way we learn has extended our way of thinking. Though the media, television, and social media is where we get our information today with the technology of Internet and social media platforms being introduced to society. I believe that the Internet can make the process better from television because it is print media and you have to use deeper thought that just viewing material. With television however, what gets the most attention is entertaining and uses minimal thought. Our Internet is set up with the content of choice there are only so …show more content…
As Postman states, “Each medium like language itself, make possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression for sensibility. Which, of course, is what McLuhan meant in saying the “medium is the message.” Postman has many similarities to McLuhan except that instead of a medium the media is a metaphor. He describes how the technology has changed our extensions of thought and intellect. As Postman states, “We used to have to have extensions of thought and intellect when we the printed word allowed us to have reflection pauses and extended or freeze our thoughts and we used to be thinking individuals with printed word by reading books and the newspaper for our answers” (). In today’s technology there is a possibility to use it as an extension tool the Internet gives us entertainment however, it also connects us socially with people from all over the world at a click of a button, which has given society new platforms to socially connect with others instead of just in
While his best arguments come from cultural criticism. Written text led to the decline of oral reading and television obliterated the radio. Every technology comes with it’s trade-offs, it just comes down to moderation. There is little doubt that the internet is changing our brain. What Carr neglects to mention, however, is how the internet can change our brain for the better. Computer games have the ability to improve cognitive tasks and increase visual attention. He doesn’t always address the good effects that the internet has had on the world. One of the better strategies Carr uses is switching his point of view from third to first person. He reflects on his personal life and how his life has changed in response to what he has learned. Carr shows how even he has his faults but, being aware of a problem is the first step to finding
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
In the first chapter of Amusing Ourselves To Death , Neil Postman's major premise is how the rise of television media and the decline of print media is shaping the quality of information we receive.Postman describes how the medium controls the message, he uses examples which include the use of clocks, smoke signals, the alphabet, and glasses.Postman says a society that generally uses smoke signals is not likely to talk about philosophy because it would take to long and be too difficult. Postman also describes the way television changes peoples way of thinking; a fat person will not look good on TV and would less likely be elected President. On the other hand someones body is not important as their ideas when they are expressing them through the radio or print. On TV, visual imagery reigns. Therefore the form of TV works against the content of philosophy. Postman shows how the clock has changed. Postman describes how time was a product of nature measured by the sun and seasons. Now, time is measured by a machine using minutes and seconds. The clock changed us into time-watchers, then time-savers, and finally time-servers. Thus, changing the metaphor for time changed how we view time itself.
... access to it from various forms of media. Instead of demolishing our ability to read and learn, the internet aids us by giving us rapid information that would otherwise take days of research through books to attain. Therefore, the internet should not be viewed as the cause for our lack of intelligence, but rather the reason for our vast knowledge. Technology has revolutionized our learning and will continue to serve as the prime tool in our education.
Postman bases his argument on the belief that public discourse in America, when governed by the epistemology of the printing press, was "generally coherent, serious, and rational" (16) because the reader was required to ingest, understand, and think about the logic of the author's arguments before coming to a verdict. In effect, intelligence in a print-based world "implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations" (26). However, with the emergence of television and its rapid ascendancy in our culture, Postman argues that discourse has become "shriveled and absurd" (16). TV, he says, assaults us with fleeting images and disconnected bits of information with no context except for the "pseudo-context" which is manufactured "to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use" (76). In effect, TV demands a certain kind of content-the "medium is the message" in the words of Marshall McLuhan-that Postman believes is suitable to the world of show business and hostile to the print-based world of logical thinking (80). This is not to say that TV ignores important subjects such as current affairs, politics, religion, science, and e...
Electronic media is inferior to print media due to the fact that electronic media can be bias, selective, and evasive for the purpose of entertainment. Electronic media serves as a form of entertainment with a main goal of serving their ratings rather than serving the people. It would seem that Postman would agree with this theory since he describes electronic media as a form of entertainment rather than a reliable source of information and facts in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Postman wrote 18 books and more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles. Postman's best known book is Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985. It explores the decline of the communication medium as television images have replaced the written word. Postman argues that television confounds serious issues with entertainment, demeaning and undermining political discourse by making it less about ideas and more about image. He also argues that television is not an effective way of providing education, as it provides only passive information transfer, rather than the interaction that he believes is necessary to maximize learning. He draws on the ideas of media theorist Marshall McLuhan to argue that different media are appropriate for different kinds of knowledge, and describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures value and transfer information in different ways.
Like Gladwell, Nicholas Carr believes the internet has negative effects. In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Carr attempts to show as the internet becomes our primary source of information, it diminishes the ability to read books and extensive research. Carr goes on to give a very well researched account of how text on the internet is designed make browsing fast and profitable. He describes how the design for skimming affects our thinking skills and attention spans. He wraps up his argument by describing what we are losing in the shift toward using the internet as our main information source. Carr suggests the learning process that occurs in extensive research and through reading is lost. While the learning process can be beneficial to scholars and intellectuals, not everyone has the capability to follow through with it. The internet offers an education that anyone can have access to and understand. Also if Carr believes the learning process is better, this option is always available for people who want to learn according to this scholarly principal. However, for the rest of the population the quick and easy access has allowed the average population to become more educated, and to expose themselves to aspects of academia that previously is reserved for
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.
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
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
Moreover, Carr’s article mentions that by using technology of any kind, users tend to embody the characteristics stimulated by that technology. He says that given that the Internet processes information almost immediately, users will tend to value immediacy. To explain, Carr gives the example of a friend of his named Scott Karp who was a literary major on college and who used to be an avid book reader. However, since the arrival of the Internet, Karp skim articles online because he could no longer read as much as he used too. He cannot pay attention and absorb long texts ever since he read online articles. Internet...
“American Media History is the story of a nation. It is the story of events in the long battle to disseminate information, entertainment, and opinion in society. It is the story of the men and women whose inventions, ideas, and struggles helped shape the nation and its media system.”(Fellow) The evolution of media has influenced countless societal and cultural changes leading to the present day. But it didn’t get this far over night. It is estimated to have begun more than 30,000 years ago through the process of cave painting. (Crewe) Following cave painting, came the invention of books being printed on blocks “The Diamond Sutra”, the Gutenberg printing press, newspapers in 1640, photographs, the radio in 1894, television, and recently computers; which lead all the way to modern day social media. Through the hard work of multiple inventors the media was able to reach where it is today. It has changed the way people communicate with each other, mostly for the better.“ The way people experience the meaning, how they perceive the world and communicate with each other, and how they distinguish the past and identify the future.” (Gitelman) Or as we know it as: a new way of communicating information from person to person.
Carr discusses the effects that the Internet has on our minds and the way we think, as well as the way media has changed. Our minds no longer focus. When in conversation with people we are constantly distracted by the technological advances our era has brought. Text messages, emails, pop culture drama has all taken over thoughts.
Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams, both cornerstones in their respected media theory and cultural studies, differed in their opinions of the relationship between media technology and social change. McLuhan believed in technological determinism, which is “an approach that identifies technology, or technological developments, as the central causal element in processes of change” (Croteau, Hoynes, and Milan 290). In other words, McLuhan believes that new technology drives the way cultural values and social structures develop. He was interested in the cultural effects produced by electronic media; he was especially interested in the effects of televisions. McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage argued that technology has changed the way humans do things and interact, that “all media are extensions of some human faculty” (McLuhan 5).