'Is Google Making USupid' By Nicholas Carr

Hannah Stenerson
Mr.Mulcaire
English 1A
Febuary 3,2017
Primitive vs Inovative
As the value of deep reading increased along with the creation of books did we loose a part of our primative selfs? Human brains are not hardwired to be able to think undistracted or to be completely immersied in one thing that you cannot be aware of your surroundings. In “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and “The Deepening Page” by Nicholas Carr the author explains the rise in value of undistracted reading and the how technology took away that skill but brought us closer to our primal way of thinking. Reading is an abnormal skill that takes training and practice. It is not something humans are born knowing how to do. In “Is Google Making Us Stupid” Carr states
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
He poses that being undistracted while reading allows people to think deeply. The abilty to think deeply has a positive connetation because it allows a person the reasources to come up with their own thoughts and opinions and better understand what they are reading. “In quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply” (65). The ablity to thinking deeply is positive because it gives the reader the ablity to form their ideas. “Reading was like working out a puzzle. The brain’s entire cortex, including the foward areas associated with problem solving and descion making, would have been buzzing with neural activity” (61). The human brain is able to uncode and solve puzzles that other species cannot. “As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our ‘intellecutal technologies’-the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities- we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.” I agree with what Carr poses, we do take on the characteristics of technology. As the saying goes our brains are like