Summary Of The Shallows By Nicholas Carr

In the first section of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr he emphasizes the downs to the very powerful internet that we use everyday. He explains how this era of the internet predicts an age of narcissism and mediocrity. Carr gives examples of how we quest after every new technology medium, how the medium alters humans, and all the technology that has shuffled and led to the internet. Carr uses the author of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man saying “ whenever a new medium comes along we are attracted to it. I agree with this idea because whenever there is a new game, social media, or even a new version of a phone we wish to have it. Everyone drops whatever they used to have and now

He quotes Dave Thomas stating “doubts can be rendered feeble in the face of the certainty of the medium.” Basically the medium’s projects make us feel the tingle is them, or the sensations in them. Nicholas Carr then says, “the screen bulldozes our doubts with its bounties and convenience. The internet is our servant as we manage it but it is also our master because we
Barry 2 grant it to alter our brains. The author indirectly states that we use the internet to do things we use to do manually. I agree because a lot of people my age, including me, shop, search everything, and many other tasks online. It is even easier for adults to do things online now, Carr says he pays bills, books rooms, and send invites. We even use social media to speak to each other instead of how we use to talk to eachother way more often. We are victims of using the internet to connect to each other. We as humans are drawn to new means of technology, it changes our emotions as we continue to use it, and we use the internet to do more online tasks. The more we use the internet as an online we are plunging ourselves into a dark era of arrogance and normality. We are all drawn to the new exciting world online where anything is

The internet really has affected the circuits in our brains. The author describes our memory, how our brains are being trained, and how attached we are. People do not memorize anything anything any more because we can look it up now. We search everything we question nowadays. The author says memorization is a “waste of time.” I disagree because memorizing facts and important ideas is highly important even though memory has lost its prime power. We usually only speak of and remember the explicit memories that just naturally stick in our brain. The explicit ones are usually feelings, events, facts, and really personal experiences, The author says memory inside our heads is the products of an extraordinary complex natural process. Carr says “the more we use the internet the more we train our brains to be easily distracted and make it hard to concentrate.” I relate to this idea because I am a product of the internet era, we have a growing dependence on the webs information. Nicholas Carr explains that the culture of a person is brought up in the influences of a person's memory. So, if we forget information because of the internet we will not have much cultural influence. Every generation should have the culture renewed. The author says culture is more than the aggregate of what google describes as “the world’s information.” I agree because