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The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains By Nicholas Carr

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The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains By Nicholas Carr
Rough Draft for The Shallows Essay

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.

One point that Carr makes in the book is that as we come
…show more content…
This is easily understood if you think about the idea that the writing style the internet normally has encourages us to read enough of a paragraph or article to get the idea of the text, but not enough to fully comprehend it. If we fail to fully immerse ourselves in new information it is not as likely to move from our short term memory into our long term memory. As Carr states in his book, “Repetition encourages consolidation (pg 184).” This quote helps make the point that the more prominent sompting is presented in our brain the more likely it is to be transferred to long term memory, and if we only read small parts of articles the information will not be prominent enough in our brains to be easily memorized. So basicly if we collect information by the use of internet research, then we will have a harder time remembering the information

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