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…
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…
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…
In the speech delivered at the Harvard Book Store Nicholas Carr, an American writer interested mainly in technology and business, presented his new book “The Shallows. What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”. The writer explained also the main thesis of his work, which seems to be the following: Using the Internet has an impact on our brain and the way it is functioning. His arguments, not against the Internet in general, but against overusing it, are the result of his personal experience as well as the scientific studies on the topic.…
Many people use the Internet in their everyday lives, but they do not understand the negative aspect that it has in their lives. In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he explains to us how the Internet affects our brains in a negative way. Some people disagree with Carr and say that the Internet is just a resource that we use in our everyday lives and it does not affect us negatively. Even though the internet has many positive aspects, the internet affects us more negatively in our everyday life.…
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.…
In class we watched a video from “A Space Odyssey” and read an article called “Is Google Making us Stupid?” The video is about a robot acting like a human and refusing to do what the human is telling him to do. In this case it is like the human is the robot. The tone makes it very scary. “Is Google Making us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr is about his idea that the internet is taking over and is affecting the way that the human mind operates. Carr relates it to his personal life and talks about how the internet has changed the way that he reads and has shortened his attention span. On one hand I agree with Carr’s idea that the internet is taking over. But on the other hand, I still insist that it has not fully to blame for the laziness of the people. Technology has both positive and negative development. Human thought is one of the centers of the world and it is sometimes uncomfortable and scary to think that this might change. Most people…
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…
In Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to our Brains,” he makes the powerful point that in order to assume technology’s power, especially intellectual technology, we must pay a particularly high price. Carr states this idea in one quote from his book, “The price we pay to assume technologies power is alienation. The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies. the tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities- those for reason perception, memory, emotion(pg 211).” This price for intellectual technologies can range from a lowered ability to pull up memorized information, a shorter attention span, having a harder time learning new information, or even a changed perception of our world. All of these points help show how the internet is affecting our brains physically and mentally.…
Straight into the beginning, Carr starts his article with a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey where Dave is trying to disconnect HAL, the space robot, from its artificial brain because of the mishaps HAL made. Carr uses this scene to connect to how he can feel that the internet is reprogramming his brain negatively to think differently than how it was before. He includes how he is struggling with the negative effects of technology that he developed like poor concentration. Carr mentions that anyone can fall into training their brain into losing the capacity to focus, including him. He has difficulty focusing on reading after two or three pages and begins to look for something else to do. Carr states that the internet “is chipping…
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…
"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.…
Since the development of Google, there has been a vast amount of information available on various topics or subjects. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” explains and examines the different ways that the internet has been more useful and beneficial, according to the words of the author, Nicholas Carr. According to the readings, the author represents and expresses his thoughts and ideas using logos. Take for instance when Carr expresses that he once was a scuba diver in a sea of words, but now he zips along like a guy on a jet ski (Carr p. 534). Carr expresses that he once was a person who hardly used the internet but now he is one who uses it on a regular basis, making feels that someone has been tinkering with his brain, making it change. No longer does he enjoy reading a book of any length because he cannot sustain concentration on the book. Carr feels that all the time he now spends online is affecting his abilities to concentrate and recognizes that the Internet has been a useful tool for him to search for information and communicate. Carr notes that, unlike footnotes, links send you to the information rather than just refer to it.…
The article called Does the Internet Make You Dumber by Nicholas Carr states that, “The Internet grants us easy access to unprecedented amounts of information. Growing body of scientific evidence suggest that the Net, with its constant distractions and interruptions, is also turning us into scattered and superficial thinkers” (1). Carr states in his article that the Internet affects people in a negative way, messing with their attention and memory. Carr also states how focused you are affects your personality, your memory, and your thoughts. One of the studies Carr looked at was conducted by a neuroscientist named Michael Merzenich. He said, “He was profoundly worried about the cognitive consequences of the constant distraction and interruptions the Internet bombards us with” (2).…
I thought about Nicolas Carr’s research of “Juggler’s Brain” and how multitasking and distractions such as technology can lead to a lot of information to not be stored in the long term memory. I believe that because I had no distractions such as technology and had full attention on the reading I was able to retain more information in my…