Nicholas Carr, What the Internet is doing to Our Brains The Shallows (2010) asserts that, “The price we pay to assume technology’s power is aienation”(Carr,2010,p56).He supports this assertion by saying, “They both ultimately achieve their mental and behavioral effects by shaping the synaptic organization of the brain.” Also by, “ We long to keep it activated”(Carr,2010,p25). The writer concludes in order for people to improve their thoughts, they will have to cope with the new technology and how they think.
Carr believes that technology is taking over how people interact with each other. In one of Carr's quotes he say’s “Technology's numbing effect”(Carr,2010,p110). When he is talking about the numbing effect he’s talking about how people
The Net is the most powerful tool that exists, it is mind-altering technology and without it, people think they are not able to reach their full potential, but people are losing their social skills in the process, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. In the book, The Shallows, the author explains how the internet is ruining our minds Carr explains how the internet is mind-altering technology. The internet pollutes our society.
The purpose of Carr’s essay is to raise skepticism of the internet and the influences it has on the mind. The internet has become a part of my daily regimen. Online is where my homework
Our concentration and contemplative skills have diminished thanks to our internet usage. Carr states that: “For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information.” Information is easily accessible and no longer requires deep research. You can easily find the idea of something on the internet by skimming it. Carr believes that our mind can be shaped by using the internet daily and could be completely different than those who read books/magazines/newspapers etcetera.
The article was chosen specifically by The Atlantic, at that time, because many assumptions and experiments were being made in that year, and the prior year, about what the internet is doing to our brains and the magazine wanted to be one of the first to publish such a work that they believed could be accurate and persuasive. In an attempt to sway the reader that the internet is affecting cognition, Nicholas Carr does not always meet the criteria
In 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).
The internet, in short, is our everyday savior when in distress. Technology is a need in the 21st century. It is our main source of communication, socializing, learning and many others. However, according to Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, published in the July/August 2008 issue of the Atlantic, the internet is reprogramming his memory, and remapping his neural circuitry. Despite using logos intensely and multiple rhetorical approaches in convincing the reader of his point of view, Carr fails to make a logical, persuading argument for multiple reasons.
In the text, Carr brings up various forms of evidence that the internet is having an effect on the way that we think and the way that we
Carr could have not said it any better, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” It has immobilized my ability to think on my own and read in-depth. Once again, technology has wiggled its way back into my life. Since reading this article, I have caught myself becoming dependent on the Internet. If I ever have questions,I automatically take out one of my devices and look up the question.
Is the internet changing our ability to focus? Or more importantly, is the internet harming our ability to focus or enhancing it? Based on my interpretation of Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, I believe he thinks it is making us worse. Although he did bring up a few valid points, his opinion is flawed due to the many benefits of the internet as well as a few assumptions he’s made of the effects it’s had on the human population. Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, brings towards us the argument that the Internet is changing the way think and do day to day activities.
Every day the world is being introduced to new technology to make life easier for people. In the article, “Is google making us stupid”, author Nicholas Carr tells us about how he believes that the internet is making us stupid by changing the way our brain processes information. Carr begins to tell us how the web is causing these issues such as how he can no longer be occupied in a book for a long period of time. He then starts to talk about how his whole life is surrounded by the internet and that is to blame for the problem he has with being able to stay focused while reading; but he also talks about how at the same time the internet benefited him so much because he is a writer. When reading this article, you can see that Carr uses a lot of
He explains that people who use the internet more often most likely have a lack of concentration. The author points out how the human brain is constantly changing and since using the internet makes searching for information very simple and quick, over time, our brain gets used to taking in information this way. He tells us about how Google is like the Internet’s church and how their end goal is to turn the internet into an artificial intelligence. The author argues that even though the internet may be beneficial, deep reading rather than skimming over words written on the internet gives a much more different and better outcome. He explains that our intelligence will slowly but eventually be crushed and turn into artificial information.
In his essay, Carr mentions his ideas on how our minds are practically stripped of all its typical mental functions and responsibilities, due to the takeover of the internet on our minds. Carr states, “The internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV” (320). The multiple capabilities and resources the internet provides us with are assuming positions that would naturally be held by our minds, therefore taking control over almost all of our mental processes. Without the need to compute thoughts and create ideas, our minds are not being used to the extent in which they truly need to grow in strength and intelligence.
In The Atlantic “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr notifies us on the ways that technology is effecting our brains in a negative way. This article starts off by talking about the internet and how it is and can be the source for almost anything. That being said, we are becoming defenseless on technology in things like work, reading, and writing. This article demands that this technology is a very big disturbance in our lives. We practically live off of this technology and commonly this media has to live up to the expectations, which us, as the audience have everything handed to us.
The internet influences the human mind and Nicholas Carr delves into the reasons in Is Google Making Us Stupid? In this article Carr examines the internet’s influential possibilities. The internet is changing people psychologically but it is not negatively impacting, it is merely an evolution for society. Carr provides well-thought input, spanning from humanity’s psychological alterations to comparisons of historical inventions. SUMMARY
Reading is harder, focusing is difficult, books are a thing of the past. In an intriguing article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” Nicolas Carr explains how the internet is affecting people’s cognitive ability to function. Since the creation of the internet, information has become more readily available, but at the cost of the human brains cognitive ability. Carr states that artificial technologies have an effect on the brains cognitive ability because its causing us to change our habits for the artificial technology. He writes about Friedrich Nietzsche a writer “[who’s] vision was failing, [who couldn’t keep] his eyes focused on a page [without it] becom[ing] exhausting and painful” (Carr 3).