Is Google Making USupid, And Clay Shirky's Article Why Abundance Is Good?

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For this assignment I have analyzed Nicholas Carr’s article titled ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ and Clay Shirky’s rebuttal article titled ‘Why Abundance Is Good.’
First we analyze Carr’s article. Looking at this cloud the words ‘reading’ and ‘information’ jump off the screen. The two words appear the highest number of times in the article, 23 and 17 times respectively. Other words that appear frequently are ‘brain’. ‘Internet’, ‘new’ and ‘work’ which all appear 12 times.
Looking at just these frequently appearing words, the words ‘internet’ and ‘new’ indicate that the article discusses the modern media, namely the Internet. Furthermore ‘information’, ‘reading’, ‘work’ and ‘brain’ seem to suggest this article discusses media and its link to information, work and mental ability. What we can’t know for certain just from this word cloud, is, what this link exactly may be.
Another thing Voyant can do is, show its user the trend and frequency with which a …show more content…

From the word cloud you can see the word ‘reading’ which is no surprise, since this is a reply to Carrr’s article which focused heavily on reading. However, what is surprising, is the fact that other than that one word there is nothing common between the word clouds generated by the two articles. Looking back at the word cloud there is one word that seems out of place, an anomaly/irregularity. ‘War’ isnt a word one would expect in this word cloud and this could be something a person would want to analyze further. To do that they would use the “Keyword in context’ tool. Doing so for the word ‘war’ would show us that all instances of the word in the article refer to a book title. Another difference that the word cloud reveals is that Carr seems to talk about the cognitive and mental effects of reading and information whereas Shirky seems to talk about the culture of reading in the

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