“Small Change” by Malcolm Gladwell is an essay that describes how technology has changed social movements. “Is Google Making us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr is an essay that describes how technology has made people have declining cognitive abilities. Both of these articles are about how people are using technology to accomplish tasks and goals they set to achieve. In my essay I’m going to compare the two essays and see where they excel and where they fail to expand their essay. Gladwell discusses the difference of how people protest or raise support in today’s society compared to how people did this before Facebook or the internet. He begins his article by telling a story about a sit-in in 1960 and how it escalated to involve the entire community. …show more content…
This essay opens up with a line from Space Odyssey in which the astronaut must shut down the machine before it kills him. After this, he goes into how he feels about how he is having trouble reading and how other people are having the same problem. Carr talks about how people are starting to become too reliant on how easy an answer is when you have a website like google which just gives you the answer without making you think about it and not having to do any work for it. He goes into how people’s brains have changed over the years. Technology has changed our brains to become more reliant on the internet and less reliant on using our brain. Carr says that in today’s society people are used to getting the answer immediately so they have decreased how long they can stay focused on something. For example, Carr stated today people usually don’t read any article longer than two to three paragraphs because they think that it is too long and that there is an easier way to do it. He tells the story of Nietzsche who was a writer whose eyes were getting bad to where he struggled at looking at the pages. So he bought a typewriter to help him with his writing. Carr says that after Nietzsche started using the typewriter to write, his papers lost the style that was in his original …show more content…
His essay doesn’t highlight the fact that technology has been taken advantage of and it has hurt some causes instead of helping them. For example, Anonymous in 2008 launched DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks on the Church of Scientology’s website and posted videos to recruit people to their cause (Hacktivism). All of this illegal activity hindered the cause instead of helping it and the activities also hurt the legal forms of protesting (Hacktivism). The groups like anonymous have had problems with people forming their own groups and breaking off from the original group because like Gladwell said these are weak ties not strong
People all around agree that technology is changing how we think, but is it changing us for the better? Clive Thompson definitely thinks so and this book is his collection of why that is. As an avid fiction reader I wasn’t sure this book would captivate me, but the 352 pages seemingly flew past me. The book is a whirlwind of interesting ideas, captivating people, and fascinating thoughts on how technology is changing how we work and think.
“Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” by Malcolm Gladwell is an article published in the Annals of Innovation, by The New Yorker magazine. Gladwell starts with an example of true activism. He opens the article with a depiction of how the Greensboro sit-ins contributed to the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Then the author supplies two examples of protests that have taken place in recent years that some people have said were started and organized on Twitter. He then goes on to clarify why Twitter was not a factor in these events and how media and government can distort certain truths about social media’s role in protests. The author continues the article by explaining why communication and relationships were more efficient before the era of social media and then compares social networking from the past and now. He uses this strategy to illustrate social media’s effect on how we interact and our commitment towards one another. Gladwell goes on to explain the organization of activist groups of the past and its
...ernment as much as the rest of the world does. Gladwell's pointing out that social media is widening the gap between extremes, a true activist and what I'd call true apathy. Our generation, along with those to follow are going to be middle of the road mouse clickers with the disillusion our "like" (in facebook terms) will have a true impact. The real problem with Gladwell's argument is that he is looking at it through an American perspective, the connections we form here in the US on facebook and twitter are indeed superficial because we have so many other ways to connect with people. In many other places around the world, social networking sites, are the only place they have in which they can freely connect with each other. And those connections are not superficial, those connection helped launch uprisings such as the ones in Tunisia and Egypt.
Technology surrounds us every day in the modern world. It has become almost a necessity to most who use it, while others would beg to differ. There is debate surrounding both articles written by Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and Jamais Cascio, “Get Smart” both arguments provide opinion and evidence about the use of technology. Carr discusses how the use of the computers affects our thought process. Carr begins by talking about his own experience as a writer and how he felt like “something had been tinkering with his brain, remapping his neural circuitry and reprogramming his memory”. (Carr, 1). On the contrary Cascio’s article "Get Smart," Cascio urges
Trying to reflect the fears instilled in himself through comparison to an unrealistic movie. I believe that the internet hasn’t changed everyone’s the way the he says its changed his. I think that people who were born into the world of technology have the ability to analyze into a deeper thought what is needed and skim for instant answer when it’s not needed. On the other side those whom have been forced to adapt to it, such as Carr, find themselves losing abilities they once relied on because they were taught growing up to do both things. Now that the internet has forced them to adapt to it, they can’t focus of doing both types of thinking. The complexity of our minds is deep and that can’t be made shallow by the ability to get instant gratification of information. We simply begin to rule out unimportant things, once the important thing is found then it can be analyzed. Although Carr says his mind isn’t going as far as it used to, clearly that’s exactly what he did in this essay. He used the older “traditional way” of over-analyzing unnecessary things to reach a point that ends up being moot. Clearly, his use of logos, ethos and pathos, although present were not enough to prove his opinion to be
The internet is our conduit for accessing a wide variety of information. In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr discusses how the use of the internet affects our thought process in being unable to focus on books or longer pieces of writing. The author feels that “someone, or something, has been tinkering with [his] brain” over the past few years (Carr 731). While he was easily able to delve into books and longer articles, Carr noticed a change in his research techniques after starting to use the internet. He found that his “concentration often [started] to drift after two or three pages” and it was a struggle to go back to the text (Carr 732). His assertion is that the neural circuits in his brain have changed as a result of surfing endlessly on the internet doing research. He supports this statement by explaining how his fellow writers have had similar experiences in being unable to maintain their concentrations. In analyzing Carr’s argument, I disagree that the internet is slowly degrading our capacity for deep reading and thinking, thereby making us dumber. The Web and Google, indeed, are making us smarter by allowing us access to information through a rapid exchange of ideas and promoting the creativity and individualization of learning.
We live in a time where technology is at the center of our society. We use technology on a daily basis, for the simplest tasks, or to aid us in our jobs, and don’t give a second thought to whether these tools are actually helping us. Writers such as Kevin Kelly and Clive Thompson argue that the use of technology actually helps us humans; whiles writers such as Nicholas Carr argue that technology affects people’s abilities to learn information negatively.
Carr starts off his argument by referencing a “2001 a space odyssey” released in 1968 about a computer named HAL that tries to kill the astronauts that are on the spaceship that HAL controls. Carr uses an excerpt from this movie to incite fear into his readers and fear clouds judgement and causes irrational ideas to be formed. This movie is an over exaggerated sci-fi thriller and not a realistic representation of what computers are becoming. At the conclusion of his argument Carr does not forget to leave his readers the way he greeted them, Carr quotes 2001: a space odyssey “i can feel it. I’m afraid” (Carr 328). Although emotions are a strong way to engage with a reader, strong emotions also distract readers from the actual argument and encourage the reader to make a decision based on their feeling rather than their actual brain. The fact that Carr uses emotion to convince his readers is quite ironic, considering he is arguing that new technology is limiting our ability to use our brains. In contrast Thompson’s article uses logic and reason to make his argument. At the same time Thompson’s article still engages readers and is just as interesting to read as Carr’s essay. Thompson’s article starts off pondering whether computers or humans are better at chess. To answer this
...al advancement. He supported his claim of cause with supportive claims of fact and value, appealing to ethos. Both Carr and Cascio provided valid points through an appeal of logos to explain how technology affects our society and continues to change the world around us. They both had very convincing arguments. However, Carr’s article proved to be more effective because he provided the emotional approach and more supportive evidence, logical reasoning, and a skeptical ideal to relate to his readers.
Every day there is some new technological advancement making its way into the world in an attempt to make life easier for people. In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, author Nicholas Carr explains his thoughts on how he believes the internet is running the risk of making people full of artificial knowledge. Carr begins by explaining how he feels that the web is causing his focus issues, how he can no longer be completely immersed in a book, and the reason why he gets fidgety while reading. He then goes on to talk about how his life is surrounded by the internet and how that is the blame for the issues he has towards not being able to stay connected to a text; but at the same time says how and why the web has been a ‘godsend’ because he is a writer. In an attempt to draw the reader in, Carr uses a great deal of rhetorical appeals. He compares the differences of the past and the present and how he feels how it has changed not only himself, but others as well and how they are able to comprehend and focus due to the growing nature of the web. While comparing this, he accumulated research from several credited writers who feel the same way he does about the effects of the web.
Author Steven Pinker uses a form of credibility towards the beginning of his article when he tells the reader that media has caused a widespread of moral panics and that technology such as reading emails or even Facebook is causing us to become skim readers. Throughout his article pinker uses a form of pathos to help persuade the audience that technology isn’t such a bad thing in a matter fact scientist have heavily relied on technology and has in corporate technology in their everyday lives. Throughout the article “Mind over Mass Media” Author Steven Pinker had used many different rhetorical devices to help persuade and draw evidence to help get the reader on his side. Author Steven Pinker’s way of organizing his factual evidence is seen to come off as very phenomenal in his article, he starts off by stating that there is the belief that technology changes us not for the better but for the worse, however he uses the paragraph that starts with “But such panics often fail basic reality checks today” Throughout Steven Pinker’s article he comes off as not biased toward his whole side of the argument on whether or not technology is tending to cause more harm or more benefit towards today’s society . While author Steven pinker came off as UN biased throughout this whole article he kept his
In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, he begins the article with a description of a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the Space Odyssey Dave Bowman argues with the supercomputer, HAL. HAL pleads to Bowman to not disconnect his circuits that control his “brain”. The computer feels his mind going; this is a feeling that Carr has also had.
Steven Pinker and Nicholas Carr share their opposing views on the effects that mass media can have on the brain. In Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” it explores his viewpoints on how increased computer use affects our thought process in a negative manner. Carr critically analyzes that having widespread access to the internet via the internet has done more harm by disabling our ability to think complexly like it is the researching in a library. On the other hand, Pinker expresses how the media improves our brain’s cognitive functions. Pinker expresses that we should embrace the new technological advances and all we need is willpower to not get carried away in the media. Although both authors bring very valid arguments
Goldberg, David Theo. “If Technology Is Making Us Stupid, It’s Not Technology’s Fault.” Blog. Digital Humanities. August 16, 2010. Gooch and Suyler. in Argument. Avenue of the Americas, New York.2011. 301-03. Print.
Although the book has its flaws, I did enlighten me on how technology affects society. I learned a great deal about technology from the book. I learned more about the increasing attachment of people to technology, how technology affects us socially, and most importantly, the e...