In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr explains his point of view of how the brain is being reprogramed due to technology. He states that the Internet changes how we receive and process information and that surfing the web takes almost no concentration and that is why we lose focus easily. Carr gives his experiences as an example in how he is no longer able to keep concentration to even complete reading an article. His main point is that search engines, like Google, and the internet in general is damaging our ability to think, and that we were probably better in the past when reading was done…
For example, Friedman, a blogger who write about the use of computers in medicine also said: “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print” (para. 6). It is a truth that our searching information method are changed into search it online, rather than find them on the books. In fact, internet searching decrease the ability of human’s…
In his essay “Is google making us stupid” Nicholas Carr explains how the internet has helped us to gather vast amounts of information very quick, but also how it has affected our attention span when the time comes to read long pieces of texts. Carr also feels that our brains are constantly getting rewired due to the amount of time we spend online has caused him to lose concentration when he is reading. Besides, make it easier to find information and rewiring our brains the internet has changed the way we comprehend what we are reading. Carr states that before the internet he could easily get caught in the argument of what he was reading and that he no longer does it because his concentration starts to drift away after reading a couple of pages.…
Reading and deep thinking is something that does not come natural for us because our minds are already wired to be in a state of distractedness. “The nautral state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness. Our predisposition is to shift our gaze, and hence our attention from one obeject to another, to be aware of as much of what’s going on around us as possible.” (63) Since the rise of technology we have noticed the decling of deep reading and thinking. There is no longer a need to look up information in a book, all of the resources we would ever need are now at our fingertips. Thus, eliminating the need for humans to read and think deeply. Carr mentions that at one time he was able to sit down and read long articles or novels with ease but now he is unable…
Thus, the Internet is portraying a mass volume of data that our brains are not equipped to successfully interpret Carr establishes that with the increase in the volume of data being portrayed to the public the use of the internet has made users impaired of focused learning…
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…
The Way We Read is Changing The Internet can be a great educational tool, providing a world of information at your fingertips very quickly. Getting information, for a research project in the past could take days of reading books and journals. Reading books has become almost obsolete. The attention span of a person reading a book is that of a goldfish, two seconds.…
Although Agger’s essay is mainly about reading electronic texts he does seem to lean more towards the written word. He believes that paper is the new “Prozac, a balm for distracted minds” (Agger 611). Reading text on paper keeps us more focused because we do not have all of the online information like ads and unnesccary pictures to stimulate our minds. He lists some of the ways how reading electronic texts poses several attention problems. Although Agger likes the written word better, he knows that sometimes there is no way to avoid reading online so he includes a list of ways to increase your focus while reading online texts. He explains how we tend to lose attention…
Nearing the end of the piece, Carr concludes that the internet and conventional reading may be two separate entities. Whether it be positive or negative, there is a distinctive difference in comprehension. Referring to traditional text he says, “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds” (Carr 580). Diving into a book or lengthy text requires the readers full focus to gain the required information. The way that many have been reading has changed to a far more superficial level. Now, reading is a vessel to gain quick insight, not a fully comprehensive…
"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.…
Attention span is the ability to stay focused on one item for a period of time without getting distracted. With Google available at the click of a button the World Wide Web of information is available at someone’s fingertips to look up anything they want. With all of this information, paying attention to one certain topic or sentence becomes very difficult. Nicholas Carr of the newspaper The Atlantic explains “I feel if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”(2). Carr use to be able to pay attention to readings for long periods of time but now is struggling to read long complicated texts. This is due to the excess amount of information available when using Google. There is so much information, instead of trying to steadily absorb what he is reading Carr now just skims through the text. Decreasing the attention spent on one-item decreases capacity for understanding complex information. Because maintaining attention on a certain topic helps to understand that topic, when Google decreases human’s attention span this results in a decrease of…
Some might have said that Google invent new innovative ways to learn. In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr’s that the internet is a threat to our brains, but there is no evidence of such cause. I found that the internet is a tool when it comes to reading, studying, and anything that I am able to find on the internet. We are in a world that enable us to learn much than in a book could which might lead to believe that technology can improve teaching and learning, but there still some continue to insist in traditional reading or writing. For example, the baby Boomer generation might be more resistant to rapid technology changes and prefer to pick a book instead figuring out how or what technology could improve one reading or writing which a lot generation X prefer to do. We have to integrate both generations to find median ground to understand digital application can improve teaching and learning due to why literacy matter. We need to able to guide the…
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…
Another flaw of the “bursts of inconsequential information” is the direct toll data-bites take on a college student’s ability to read longer works of writing. Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain and psychologist at Tufts University, claims, “We are not what we read. We are how we read.” She continues to be concerned with a reading style, such as the style of reading Twitter, that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else. She believes this type of reading weakens our capacity for deep reading. She also explains that reading is not instinctive, as speech is, for humans. She claims as people read, they shape the neural circuits in their brains and train themselves how to focus on pieces…
In the past, the technology wasn’t like nowadays. Students needed to search in many books to find the information that they want. It was very hard and take a lot of time to write a piece of paper. In some cases, it was difficult to find every information wanted in one library. So students need to go to many libraries. For that reason, people found that getting a Master degree or PhD hard. But nowadays people can use technology to study. Internet made learning and education easier. Student can find anything they want in a min. In comparison with the past, education now is simpler. So people now want to get Master and PhD degrees. Technology is very useful for students to learn better; however, it could have a negative effect if it used incorrectly.…