The Internet vs our brain
English 1130.021
February 19th, 2014
Word count: 1094
The Internet and Its Destruction of Our Brain For billions of people across the globe, the Internet is a crucial part of their everyday lives whether for business or social purposes. The amount of Google searches per day has skyrocketed over the last 15 years. In 1998, the average number of searches was 9,800. Today, there are over 5.9 trillion per day (Comscore). The Google search engine is only two decades old (Comscore), but has significantly changed the way it has allowed people think. People are continuing to rely on the Internet instead of their brains, resulting in a decrease of one’s ability to think deeply, perform connection making and interact with others.
Some would say that the Internet has become bliss for students completing school work. With easy access to unlimited information, assignments and essays can be done in a fraction of the time it would take without the Internet. However, with the Internet comes the temptation of plagiarism. Since the Internet is so accessible, the quick and easy act of “cut and paste” becomes frequent. In 2011, one in three high school students admit that they had used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment (McCabe 2). It seems as though many people are not going online to do traditional reading, but to find the ‘quick fix’ so they can answer the question instantly. The connection making aspect has been lost due to the lack of in depth reading and applying this new knowledge to an assignment. In Nicholas Carr’s essay, “Is Google making us Stupid?” he introduced an experiment conducted by scholars from the University College London who performed a study about the behaviour of people visiting two research websites. They concluded that:
People using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or
February 19th, 2014
Word count: 1094
The Internet and Its Destruction of Our Brain For billions of people across the globe, the Internet is a crucial part of their everyday lives whether for business or social purposes. The amount of Google searches per day has skyrocketed over the last 15 years. In 1998, the average number of searches was 9,800. Today, there are over 5.9 trillion per day (Comscore). The Google search engine is only two decades old (Comscore), but has significantly changed the way it has allowed people think. People are continuing to rely on the Internet instead of their brains, resulting in a decrease of one’s ability to think deeply, perform connection making and interact with others.
Some would say that the Internet has become bliss for students completing school work. With easy access to unlimited information, assignments and essays can be done in a fraction of the time it would take without the Internet. However, with the Internet comes the temptation of plagiarism. Since the Internet is so accessible, the quick and easy act of “cut and paste” becomes frequent. In 2011, one in three high school students admit that they had used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment (McCabe 2). It seems as though many people are not going online to do traditional reading, but to find the ‘quick fix’ so they can answer the question instantly. The connection making aspect has been lost due to the lack of in depth reading and applying this new knowledge to an assignment. In Nicholas Carr’s essay, “Is Google making us Stupid?” he introduced an experiment conducted by scholars from the University College London who performed a study about the behaviour of people visiting two research websites. They concluded that:
People using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or