Mind Altering Technology: The Shallows By Nicholas Carr

311 Words1 Page
bulb-icon

Recommended: effects of screen technology on cognition.

Mind Altering Technology Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows (2011), asserts that spending time on the Internet has decreased his attention span. Carr supports this assertion by talking about all the things he easily does on the web and explains how he can not even pay attention to longish stories or even read certain books and processing their information. One can easily agree with Carr because research indicates that technology alters humans brains in numerous ways. Researching and reading online multiple times can and will affect the way your brain processes information by affecting our ability to read a process information from books. Also, when people use the internet a lot, they cannot remember and retain information as well People

Show More
Related

  • Greg Lukianoff And Jonathan Haidt's The Coddling Of The American Mind

    832 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the article “The Coddling of the American Mind” the authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt express that college campuses in America are dealing with emotional discomfort every day. They point out whether we are too emotional on certain topics in our lives or we need to change something on college campuses to have students feel more comfortable. College student have experienced a lot in life so I think that campuses should help college students through traumatic experiences in their past instead of not acknowledging certain topics and banning them to discuss in class like rape and domestic violence which happens in our everyday life. Colleges need to step up and talk about these things so students can feel more comfortable.

    Read More

  • Empathy and (Film) Fiction, by Alex Neill

    1015 Words  | 3 Pages

    Relations between sympathy-empathy expressiveness and fiction have become a significant issue in the debate on the emotional responses to the film fiction. Due to their complexity many scholars found it useful to diagram them. With his essay, “Empathy and (Film) Fiction”, Alex Neill tries to develop new theory for analyzing the fiction and, especially, the emotional responses from the audience on it. The project of this essay is represented with an aim to show the audience the significant value of the emotional responses to the film fiction. From my point of view in the thesis of his project he asks a simple question: “Why does the (film) fiction evoke any emotions in the audience?”, further building the project in a very plain and clever way. Tracing the origins of this issue, he distinguishes between two types of emotional responses, sympathy and empathy, as separate concepts in order to understand the influence of both types of emotional responses to fiction. However, relying mostly on this unsupported discrepancy between two concepts and the influence of the “identification” concept, Neill finds himself unable to trace sympathy as a valuable response to fiction. This difficulty makes Neill argue throughout the better part of the text that empathy is the key emotional factor in the reaction to (film) fiction and that it is a more valuable type of emotional response for the audience.

    Read More

  • Nicholas Carr's In the Shallows

    1093 Words  | 3 Pages

    Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print.

    Read More

  • Thompson's Brave New World Of Digital Intimacy

    963 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Carr concerns about spending too much time on web, making people lose the patient and ability to read and think and changing people’s thinking behaviors. He gives so many points: he can not read lengthy article used to be easy; many author begin to feel that too much reading online let them hard to read and absorb a longish article; we put efficiency and immediacy above understanding when we read; The circuits in brain has been altered by reading habit.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Nicholas Carr's Article Is Google Making USupid?

    777 Words  | 2 Pages

    According to www.telegraph.co.uk, “[y]oung people aged between 16 and 24 spend more than 27 hours a week on the internet.” Certainly this much internet usage would have an effect on someone. What exactly is the effect of using the internet too much? Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” argues that we are too reliant on the internet and it is making the us dim-witted and shortens our attention span. While Clive Thompson’s article “Smarter than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better” states that technology is not only a collection of knowledge, it also a method of sharing and recording our own knowledge. I fall between both Carr and Thompson. I agree with car on his points of us being too reliant on the internet but disagree when he states that it is making us less intelligent. Meanwhile, I also support Thompson’s statement that the internet allows us to assimilate vast amounts of knowledge but disagree with his opinion on how we should be reliant on

    Read More

  • How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds By Nicholas Carr

    865 Words  | 2 Pages

    Nicholas Carr wrote ‘How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds’ published in the Wall Street Journal in 2017. Carr believes that as the brain becomes reliant on smartphones the intellect diminishes.

    Read More

  • Nicholas Carr's How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds

    542 Words  | 2 Pages

    In “ How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds,” Nicholas Carr is persuading his audience to refrain from and shorten their amount of smartphone usage, and he reveals his perspective on how he believes that smartphones are hijacking our minds, and causing issues in our society. Carr cleverly uses several devices to persuade his audience and to drive his point home. Among these devices are statistics, comprehensive language, and reasoning. Nicholas Carr uses statistics to involve the data he has found to support his claim that numbers don’t lie. “In both tests, the students whose phones were in view posted the worst scores.

    Read More

  • Is Google Making USupid: The Dumbest Generation

    611 Words  | 2 Pages

    The article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” by Nicholas Carr, “The net is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” This makes sense to me, a teen living in the technological age. Thanks to the internet, information can be acquired at rapid speed, making teens have less of an attention span. We expect to find information so quickly, that when we don’t, we give up. That means our natural skills are being stripped away from us due to the internet and technology. “The New Literacy,” by Clive Thompson explains how kids are losing their ability to write. “Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into ‘bleak, bald, sad shorthand’.” This piece of evidence makes sense. On a daily basis, texting and its language is a skill that’s always being sharpened by adolescents. After a long spring break of texting and spending time on social media, personally, turning right around and writing an essay becomes a challenge. The world of texting and regular dialogue is vastly different. Because we spend so much time on social media, our capability to compose pieces of writing has

    Read More

  • Smarter than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

    625 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • 'By Brooke Gladstone And Josh Neufeld's The Influencing Machine'

    770 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld is an original work, a highly researched yet highly accessible survey of all things media from the history of media/journalism beginning in ancient Rome through the Mayan scribes to the First Amendment press freedoms of the U.S. Constitution and beyond and how the media 's mission and its means have advanced through history. At the same time, Gladstone debunks claims of the media 's nefarious influence on people from mind control and presumed biases to "moral panics," recurring historical charges of cognitive distraction, intellectual diminishment, and social alienation, now lodged against the likes of Google, video games, and the virtual world in general as digital culture stakes

    Read More

  • Analysis Of 'How Facts Backfire And Is Google Making USupid'

    856 Words  | 2 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • The Shallows: Artificial Intelligence Enhances Human Life

    281 Words  | 1 Pages

    Firstly, artificial intelligence enhances human life. LeBlanc explains artificial intelligence is not just the commonly thought robot. Artificial intelligence ranges from Google to word check. Google, and many other just like it, have allowed humans to gain more knowledge of what is going on. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brain, tells the constant notifications of news from websites makes humans more aware of what is going on. Carr does not necessarily think these constant notifications are beneficial, but they are. The idea of constantly being aware directly enhances human life. The more connected humans are through the internet the more aware they are of what is going on. For example, the internet

    Read More

  • Junk Science by Lee Ann Fisher Baron

    1609 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Lee Ann Fisher Baron’s “Junk Science,” she claims that the “food industry with the help of federal regulators” sometimes use “[a science that] bypasses [the] system of peer review. Presented directly to the public by…‘experts’ or ‘activists,’ often with little or no supporting evidence, this ‘junk science’ undermines the ability…[for] everyday consumers to make rational decisions” (921). Yet Americans still have a lot of faith in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). According to a 2013 Pew Research study, 65% of Americans are “very favorable” or “mostly favorable” of the FDA. When it comes to what people put in their bodies, the FDA has a moral obligation to be truthful and transparent. The bottom line of the FDA’s myriad of responsibilities is to help protect the health of Americans. Deciding what to eat is a critical part of living healthily, and consumers must be able to trust that this massive government agency is informing them properly of the contents of food. While the FDA does an excellent job in many areas, it has flaws in other areas. One of its flaws is allowing the food industry to print food labels that are deceptive, unclear, or simply not true (known as misbranding). This is quite the hot topic because a Google search for “Should I trust food labels” returns well over 20 million results, many of which are blog posts from online writers begging their readers not to trust food labels. HowStuffWorks, a division of Discovery Communications, published an online article whose author claims that “[the food industry] will put what they want on labels. They know the game….” While the food industry is partially at blame for misbranding, the FDA is allowing it to happen. If a mother tells her children that it is oka...

    Read More

  • Betsy Sparrow

    874 Words  | 2 Pages

    Long before we had access to the Internet, the means of obtaining knowledge were limited to a resources such as textbooks, encyclopedias, lectures and the willingness to inhabit the library all weekend. These were crucial ways for us to gather information and keep hold of what we absorbed. Fast forward to the 21st century and all of the world’s knowledge is just one click away. As amazing as it sounds to have information in an instant, it's starting to impact our brains. In the readings by John Bohannon and Nicholas Carr, they explain how the internet changed the way we read and how we conserve the information we read.

    Read More

  • internet changing our brains

    790 Words  | 2 Pages

    Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

    Read More

More about Mind Altering Technology: The Shallows By Nicholas Carr

Open Document