Preview

Dumbest Generation Synthesis

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
583 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Dumbest Generation Synthesis
The Dumbest Generation Synthesis Essay In the modern world of today, the Web is the medium of all information. It is how information is transmitted and created. It’s how information is viewed and immortalized. Why is it then, that the Web is making today’s generation “dumber”? It does feel as if we, this current generation of people, are becoming more blunt and dull. Many professors and scholars point the cause to the our carefree lifestyle, the web, and the furthering advancement of technology.
Through the hard work and labor of past generations can we, today’s generation, sit at home without a single care. All of our needs are mouth fed to us, like a captive animal. And like captive animals, when we are sent into the “real world”, we will have none of the skills or knowledge
…show more content…
It is as if all the knowledge of anything we ever need to know is placed behind a computer screen, as Source 8 illustrates. We have lost the need to be curious as everything has been explored. Source 1 states, “The mind should profit alongside the youthful ego, the thirst for knowledge satisfied as much as the craving for fun and status. But the enlightenment hasn’t happened. Young Americans have much more access and education than their parents did, but in the 2007 Pew survey on ‘What Americans Know: 1989-2007,’ 56 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds possess low knowledge levels, while only 22 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds did.” Even with all the mediums for knowledge, people of today’s generation know even less than previous generations. Nicholas Carr acknowledges the side effects caused by the net in Source 4, “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it.…” The Web and furthering technology is making people become lazy in processing new

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Nowadays, if a young adult hears about a new terminology, instead of going to a library and looking it up in an encyclopedia like what his or her parents would do when they were young, he or she will pull out his or her smartphone and “google” it. Thanks to Google and all other information technology providers, the information and knowledge in this world are closer to the netizens than any other time in the history. In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, more than acknowledging the great opportunities which Google has brought to him, Carr brings up his own concern that “the Net …is chipping away [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation.” He also points out the Net is reprogramming people’s brain circuits to change…

    • 999 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Carr states, “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles” (Carr, 2008). The ability of the human brain to absorb information as quickly as a computer can generate it is highly improbable. This in it of itself proves in fact, that the Internet is making us stupid. The human brain cannot compete with a computer processor. In doing so, the consumer’s brain is only absorbing less amounts of information as it tries to keep up with the speed of the World Wide Web. Carr eloquently identifies with both the young and the old and highlights different aspects of factual information in creative examples to allow the reader to imagine his examples accurately. Carr leads the reader down his intended path, example after example, word by word while stressing that he himself has been a victim of the mental shortcomings. The Internet is a seemingly boundless information highway – unfortunately running at a speed that the human brain cannot contend with. In an attempt to keep up with the ever changing way knowledge is presented to consumers, once reliant upon word of mouth news – which evolved into hand pressed newspaper articles to fire side chats on the radio, the general…

    • 1194 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    In "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Nicholas Carr argues his deep concern on the use of the Internet and how it is affecting our brains. Carr feels like he has built upon the habit of skimming through articles for research. As a frequent user he has built such a strong habit of this that he can now no longer have the patience to sit down and read an actual book. For it lacks the instant gratification he is so used to getting from the Internet: "What the net seems to be doing is chipping away from my capacity for concentration and contemplation," Carr confesses. The Internet is changing the way its user’s minds process information. People are losing concentration easier than before and instead of truly reading material, they are skimming and mentally…

    • 1208 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The efficiency of the web has forever changed our lives, although it might not be for the best. Ever since the invention of ways of communication, people have been talking down about them and saying they are not good for us, finally society might listen. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” written by Nicholas Carr, Carr asserts how the internet is depleting our abilities to read deeply as well as explaining how our concentration abilities deem nonexistent while trying to read anything more than a few paragraphs. The essay is written towards people who feel the effects of the efficiency of the web; loss of concentration and lack of ability to retain information. Nicholas Carr is not persuasive in his essay due to his overuse of assertion and lack…

    • 150 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Nowadays, if a young adult hears a new terminology, instead of going to a library and looking it up in an encyclopedia as what his or her parents would have done, he or she will pull out his or her smartphone and “google” it. Thanks to Google and all other commercial Internet companies, we are closer to all kinds of information, both useful and useless, than any other time in human history. In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he admits how the immediate access to the rich store of online information is benefiting him largely as a writer (Carr, 589). While enjoying this positive influence of the Net, however, he brings up a side effect of the Internet which is hardly ever mentioned:…

    • 1532 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr argues that people are more interested in instant gratification when they take in information than they are in critically thinking about it. He states that people adapt very quickly to new technologies and incorporate aspects of said technologies into their perception of the world, so inventions such as the computer, which are developed for the purpose of fast rapid information transfer, influence the rate at which people evaluate information. It is more common to see people unable to concentrate on activities such as reading today than it was ten years ago. People are more used to scrolling through web pages and skimming articles than assessing the information they come across. Although this method of accessing information allows people to research more efficiently, people are also more likely to acquiesce to whatever mindset…

    • 565 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Google-Making USupid

    • 202 Words
    • 1 Page

    In “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr expresses his concerns on how the Internet is changing the way his mind works and how it’s affecting him in a negative way. Carr suggests that the Internet offers us the benefit of quick and easy knowledge. However, he goes into details about how we merely rely on Google that makes us process information differently from the past and how it’s degrading our critical-thinking skill. Moreover, he touches upon his own experience how accessible the Internet is with hyperlinks and flashy ads that can divert his attention from reading. With this, he noticed that his capacity on concentration for reading has been taken away. Carr proved that others have experienced the same thing that he did…

    • 202 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    To gaze into the lyrics of both Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur is like living in the ghettos of New York City where violence never stops. Both of these artists grew up seeing and living a life filled with violence. Gunshots and drive-byes, death and murder were a daily occurrence. Although the lyrics of both artists are simply telling their life stories and how hard it was to grow up in their “hoods” they contain vulgar, hateful, and sexual verses that send the wrong message to their listeners. Whether these listeners are teens or adults, white or black, they are continually sending notions of hatred and fear through their lyrics and actions. Ultimately, their lyrics, actions, and creation of the East coast West coast rivalry began promoting violence to whoever hears, listens, or watches them.…

    • 1058 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Mark Bauerlein's “The Dumbest Generation” states that being meaningfully connected is important, yet significantly interferes with our learning. The excerpt explains that we need to tone down our social connections in favour of education in order to excel in life, evident in Bauerlein’s statement, “Kids need a reprieve and retreat. For them to grow up into mindful citizens, and discerning consumers, then, adolescents need to break the social circuit and think beyond the clique and the schoolyard.” Bauerlein also holds the opinion on how “Maturity follows a formula: The more kids contact one another, the less they heed the tutelage of adults. When peer consciousness grows too fixed and firm, the teacher’s voice counts for nothing…

    • 1318 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    With the increased use of the Internet in people’s lives, a person cannot help but to feel a shift in the way he or she processes information so that the passages he or she reads are given cursory attention for the sake of efficiency. There are many consequences to this type of thinking. For instance, as Nicholas Carr, the writer of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” states, readers are more likely to put speed and practicality above forming connections within the text, which “may be weakening [their] capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace” (Carr 229). As unlikely as it seems, the way people read affects how they think. In the case of the Internet, the increase in information has shaped people to become shallow thinkers.…

    • 484 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr illustrates to me that the internet is slowing down the development of our brain. I agree with his argument that technology has affected out attention span, he sets an example of how we now cannot concentrate on the readings, Scott Karp, and Bruce Friedman, both agree that their ability to read long articles has been affected by the web. Also, I agree with Carr that we are becoming low thinking people because the internet gives us easy access to have quick information research. However, I think that Google and the internet are actually helping us to learn new information. It is because when the computers are not here, we do all things by hand. If you want to know what a word means, you would need to get a dictionary. If you want to look up something that your teacher mentioned in class, but you don't know what it is, or how does it look like. Then, you would have to find the encyclopedia to look for it. In nowadays, we do everything by computer, communicate with people, blogging, searching, watch videos, etc. We can learn new information quickly by searching from the internet. As Carr said, "It [the Net] injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site" (Carr 62). They take away our concentration, when we are reading an article there are lots of ads, hyperlinks, which would take our attentions. Thus, we will go to another website and look for other stuffs.…

    • 513 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Nicholas Carr

    • 1162 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Nicholas Carr is a first gerenration,well informed author who writes about how the internet is impacting our minds and lives.Since 2003 Carr has been writing critically about the consequences due to this vast creation, that is the internet. He has written several books and articles including “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” and "IT Doesn't Matter". This response essay is to one of Nicholas Carrs articles in particular from The Atlantic called, “ Is Google Making Us Stupid “ where he argues that due to our ‘skimming and hooping ‘ done on the internet from one hyperlink to another , our brains are rewiring and the entire basis of how we think , read and remember is changing.here, Carr argues that due to this rewiring,…

    • 1162 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Nicholas Carr Synthesis

    • 714 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Prior to the internet and Google, many relied on the use of books to assist with much of the research necessary for reports, projects and essays. Now, students can simply use any technologic device to search and discover thousands of sites with information relevant to their desired topic. Although having information at your fingertips is convenient and fast, it has stripped the millennials ability of elaborate reading and analysis of a lengthy narrative. Carr claims that the internet has been "chipping away" (Source 4) at millennial's concentration. Brainwashing them into becoming dependent on the web for the entirety of our information, whether it be for educational information or even for a simple question, rather than depending on our own brain and knowledge. In place of a more effective, slow, and thoughtful thinking pattern, our minds now expect to process information "in a swiftly moving stream of particles," (Source 4). This can prove to be a great issue when required to thoroughly study something, many millennials may find themselves struggling with the entire…

    • 714 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    learn. While the Internet gives us access to more information than before, paradoxically, we are…

    • 1965 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Dumbest Generation

    • 664 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Modern technology has its merits. As Bauerlein points out in his article “the Dumbest Generation”, the digital revolution has provided us with “miraculous quick and effortless contact with information.” Indeed, we are the generation surrounded by technology, and the immediate access to countless of information has definitely aided us in many aspects of the modern society. Researching information has become…

    • 664 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays