The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains By Nicholas Carr

As the internet gains popularity, people have begun changing the way they read their books. Rather than reading printed copies of books, people have begun reading electronic copies of books or simply listening to audio books. While these forms of reading seem more convenient, could these new forms of reading books impact the way books are read? As explained in The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, the internet has changed the way books are read, therefore negatively impacting the way books are interpreted by making it harder for modern readers to follow story lines and truly capture main ideas as writers intended.

Reading online may seem easier, but it also creates distractions that pull readers away from the story. One example of these distractions are hyperlinks, as explained by Carr, "Hyperlinks also alters our experience of media... Hyperlinks are designed to grab our attention. Their value as navigational tools is inextricable from the distraction they cause" (Carr 90). As opposed to helping the reader gain a better understanding, they consistently pull the reader away from the book they were reading. Hyperlinks cause people to go from link to link until they

As explained by Jordan Grafman, "The constant shifting of our attention when we're online may make our brains more nimble when it comes to multitasking , but improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively" (Carr 140). When people use the internet they are not taking time to think about what they are doing. They are just acting. This leads to people just doing and not thinking. That mentality becomes a problem when it comes to attempting to deep read. It becomes evident that as people use they internet more and more, they begin to lack the patience and ability to commit and figure out the meaning or main idea of a book or even a complicated