Smarter Than You Think Analysis

In the current years, people cannot imagine their life without technology because technology has changed and developed many products. Various technologies are helping people to live their life with more comfort and convenience. Meanwhile, in the articles “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr and “Smarter Than You Think” by Clive Thompson that I chose from they say I say, the authors are both argue about the technology, and they believe technology is changing the way on the human mind today. Although both articles are closely related, they are also completely different. Thompson think technology bringing us a lot of benefits, but Carr suspicious that the advancing technology is a wicked invention to us. However, to begin understanding
the similarities and differences between their perspectives. They must be properly to explain. Firstly, in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr believes that we should be suspicious of the internet because of the adverse ways it may be shaping the way we think. Thinking critically about his article, I can find many patterns in his writing, such as fact and fiction, cause and effect, presenting evidence in an argument, etc. Carr starts his article with a quote from a movie which talks about “the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene.”(Carr 1) This part of the article is obviously fictional, but it does a good job in leading up to the next point: Carr discusses that he feels like his mind is being influenced by high technologies. He pointed out that even as a writer he has to be very hard to concentrate on a book because something is disturbing his minds, he always wants to find something else to do like searching and surfing the internet. And he uses his friends and bloggers he followed as examples, stating that “When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences” (Carr 3). While impossible to say whether this is fiction or not, one can reason that he is most likely stating the facts. Carr brings up the facts from a London research where results show that internet readers are not reading in traditional methods and they do not absorb the traditional way of text that they are reading. Carr then brings up a conversation that he had, stating an interesting fact of how reading is not part of our genes like how speech is. That is a very interesting fact and that suggests the way we read can be influenced like other habits. He brings in reference from other professors he has talked and mentions how the human brain can still be molded with growing ages. However, the main point of this essay is to discussion how the internet may have negative effects on the human mind. Carr states how his memories are influenced by the internet jumping from one page to the next. He supports that his reading habits used to be spontaneous and have become struggles. He argues that the zip lining across the internet is changing how we both read and how we interpret text. He backs this up of evidence from a research program performed in London which suggests that people using the sites exhibited “‘a form of skimming activity,’ hoping from one source to another and rarely retuning to any source they’d already visit. ”(Carr 4) and “they typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or a book before they would bounce out to another site. Sometimes they would save a long article, but there’s evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.” (Carr 4). Another point Carr tries to argue is that technology is taking a part of forming in his thoughts, because he proposes it has “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”(Carr 4) Carr is afraid technology has remolded the human mind, therefore, his paper stirs up thoughts of a negative relationship between technology and us. On the other hand, “Smarter Than You Think” by Thompson, compare with “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” he uses a difference way to make a question in the beginning, lead to the following points of how an advanced machine are smarter than us.
According to the question, would I say technology is a good thing that? Yes! I could say that i am very optimistic about the future in technologies and I totally agree with Thompson’s positive views. In my outstanding technology is a built machine used to make people’s life easier and simpler. Thompson introduces the ideas of machines early in his book referencing to a chess playing computer, stating that“Chess grand masters had predicted for years that computers would eventually beat humans” (Thompson 2) In his article, he makes a connection between the uses of technology and the technology from many years ago. Through communication, many people can share their inventions of a new idea. I found it was very interesting that how he mentioned the influences technology has caused by the newer technology. As mentioned in his article, the printing press shows how many people will be impacted by technology. Can people live without it if it was derived from them? Introduced hundreds, of years ago, who knows the printing press would transform into a printer that can print out a few pages paper in less than a minute? The Internet age has produced a radically new style of human intelligence, worthy of both celebration and
analysis.