How Dumb Can We Get Susan Jacoby Analysis
The Cease of Journalism in the Digital Age
Waking up on a Sunday morning, enjoying a freshly brewed mug of coffee, relaxing at home reading the newspaper… to most Americans, this would seem like an ideal leisurely weekend. This has been a social norm for almost a century up until only recently. Now, we find ourselves lazily staying in bed catching up on social media, text messages, and the occasional news blurb located conveniently within our smartphones. Because of this conveniency, technology has had a considerable negative impact on traditional journalism during the last decade.
As a nation, Americans have experienced nothing but the rise of journalism since its birth in the mid-1600s. Starting off with hand-written bulletins, gazettes, and graduating to widespread newspaper publications, our entire nation has consistently been supplied with reliably sourced and usually unbiased information and educational articles. Having twenty-four seven instant access to the internet has changed the way we receive, read, and perceive information… but how so? Susan Jacoby’s article, “How Dumb Can We Get?” references this subject matter throughout.
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She describes the rise of technology as “[...] a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science, and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.” Is this truly what Americans are doing in their spare time? According to measurements by comScore, the top apps downloaded by smartphone users in the last year include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, and Snapchat. Slowly but surely, our love of learning is being replaced by the societal norms of social
Summary Of Pearls Before Breakfast By Nicholas Carr
1263 Words | 6 PagesHe states that the way we read on the internet is changing the way we think and making us less contemplative. Similarly, in “Pearls before Breakfast”, Weingarten notes that “the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences.” We live in a time when technology can be used to replicate reality, augment reality, and create virtual reality. Technology obviously has its place, but at the same time, it can be potentially suffocating and suppressing. It is common knowledge that a significant number of people waste countless hours, forfeiting vocational and academic achievement due to digital distractions that have little or no lasting
Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
1679 Words | 7 PagesIn his essay Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr argues that our dependence on the Internet changes the way we read and think. He includes his own personal testimony to support this claim, as well as others’ descriptions, including several friends, and bloggers that Carr quote. While he lacks scientific proof supporting his claim, multiple testimonies support his claim that the internet has changed the way people think. However, Carr views this negatively, saying that “I’m not thinking the way I used to think… my concentration often starts to drift… I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text” (633-634).
Similarities Between Where The Women Are And Is Google Making USupid
1135 Words | 5 PagesNinety-one percent of all adults have their mobile phone with arm’s reach every hour of every day. This statistic should be surprising, but it really isn’t when you look at how much we use technology in our daily lives. These two articles both discuss technology, but in many different ways. While the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” has a similarity to “Where the Women Are” in the broad topic of technology, they differ in speaker, occasion, purpose, subject, audience, tone, and appeals used.
How To Write A Rhetorical Analysis Essay
483 Words | 2 PagesSince the advent of the personal computer, the amount of information and interconnectedness between people has dramatically increased. With one click of a button someone could go from checking the scores of their favorite football team to conversing with a friend anywhere in the world. In “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr, he explores the consequences of the massive amounts of information one can obtain via the internet. While I agree with Carr on the effects the internet has on how people read, there is a limit to the amount of people the internet actually affects.
Is Voting For Young People
1129 Words | 5 PagesIn table 2.1 wattenberg shows the decline in ratings of network news. Wattenberg credits the decline in television network news to the growing trend of “soft news”. Which could be described as any news which lightly describes information or provides entertaining news. Our generation Wattenberg describes, has become increasingly less interested in politics and more intrigued with being entertained. “By 2004 senior citizens were four times more likely to watch network news every night than those under 30 in the past week.”
The Braindead Megaphone Analysis
800 Words | 4 PagesSociety expect to be constantly entertained; they have become so concerned with things such as who the latest star is dating, scandals, or dumb people doing rather idiotic things. Much of society have been consumed in their personal instant gratification and what makes them “happy”. When on an off chance that news does show things that are serious and impactful(not necessarily positive things that is happening in the world) people have become so numb that the best they could do is feel sympathetic and at worst continue on with their day. The other part of the problem is that those behind what is being published and shown on the news media have been absorbed in their avarice nature, whatever allows them to make as much profit they do. “Writing thousands of hours of coverage from what could have been summarized in a couple of minutes every few weeks, a new rhetorical strategy was developed, or-let’s be generous-evolved”(6), Saunders describes the new formula formed by mass news firms that would yield the most profit.
Growing Up Tethered Argument
157 Words | 1 PagesI do believe she is making a logical point that our generation of teenagers are attached to the current technology. We as teenagers, speaking from experience, will be on our phones while driving when we know we shouldn’t, we’re not only risking our lives we’re risking someone else’s just to be connected to our
Mind Over Mass Media Summary
181 Words | 1 PagesThe article “Mind Over Mass Media”, written by Professor Steven Pinker, describes the impact of media on human lives and brains. Pinker illustrates the benefits people gain from using the worlds quickly increasing technology and media. Pinker suggests that today’s technology such as, PowerPoint, Google, and other forms of social media can actually enhance and bring more intelligence to the mind, instead of being detrimental. Critics believe that the many different forms of media can lower intelligence. However, Pinker declares that scientists are using all of this technology everyone else is using, and are still discovering new things.
Critical Analysis Of Growing Up Tethered By Sherry Turkle
1084 Words | 5 PagesGrowing Up Tethered A professor at the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, Sherry Turkle talks about how kids today are attached and somewhat obsessed with technology in her article called “Growing Up Tethered.” Turkle interviews with many different teenagers about the different types of technology they possess and how it impacts their everyday life. She talks a lot about how technology can do away with our privacy and also how people feel the need to be constantly connected.
Andrea Lunsford's Our Semi-Literate Youth? Not So Fast
872 Words | 4 PagesOne hundred years ago nobody heard about the news or current events from Facebook or the newest tweet. Until fairly recently the most up to date news had to be heard through the grapevine or read in a newspaper. Since the creation of the internet and the mass media that comes with it, information can now be spread all the way across the world in the time it takes to hit the enter button on a computer or phone and upload it to the internet. Some people think that this is a bad thing because so many things that are uploaded can be either false information or simply information that is misleading and could teach individuals the wrong thing. However, if mass media is used in the right way it can be beneficial to the accessibility of valuable information,
In Praise Of A Snail's Pace By Ellen Goodman
117 Words | 1 PagesSociety’s core is built around advancing – always creating more. Within the last decade the advancement of technology has grown substantially and has had huge effects on society. In her essay, “In Praise of a Snail’s Pace”, Ellen Goodman illustrates the effects technology has on people. Throughout her essay, Goodman’s opinion on technology is that people shouldn’t rely on it as much as they do. She touched on the fact that people get caught up in their own life through the means of technology.
Summary Of Why Literature Matters By Dana Gioia
411 Words | 2 PagesAs the digital age comes upon us, more and more Americans become dissatisfied with the state of literacy in this generation. Because the Internet paves the way for shorter and shorter interactions, namely articles versus novels and six-second viral videos versus films, many people that grew up in the age of the Internet have a preference for this condensed form of entertainment. Dana Gioia of The New York Times asserts in his essay “Why Literature Matters” that the decline of reading in America is destined to have a negative impact on society as a whole. Gioia opens his essay with a bittersweet account of which trend is occurring in the twenty-first century America arts scene. He notes that as college attendance rates blossom, the interest
Benefits Of Technology Smarter Than You Think
1388 Words | 6 PagesThompson also claims that digital tools can help people’s lives become easier and connect with other people through social media. Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Smarter?”, argues how technology doesn’t make people any smarter. Carr mentions how people’s literacy is being overthrown by technology. People tend to read whatever interest they want by using a search engine rather than reading books. Another
Digital Natives Analysis
830 Words | 4 PagesIn Boyd’s chapter on exploring if today’s youth are truly digital natives, she claims that today’s youth does not fully understand digital literacy and should not be referred to as digital natives because the term does not accurately represent the level of skills today’s youth has. Boyd introduces the idea of today’s youth as being digital natives and how that separates them from the rest of the world. She then states that in this view of thinking, “teens are digital natives, and adults, supposedly less knowledgeable about technology and less capable of developing these skills, are digital immigrants” (Boyd 176). This is where Boyd begins to present the issues surrounding calling youth digital natives and why the term should be avoided. Boyd
Alone Together By Sherry Turrkle Analysis
1685 Words | 7 PagesTechnology makes peoples’ lives even busier. In the essay “Alone Together”, Sherry Turkle witnesses how technology changes connections and relationships between people, and influences the authentic lives in the end. Thus, although technology makes people busier, they are accustomed to busyness and technology
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