Does Clay Shirky's Does The Internet Make You Smarter?

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The internet is ever changing, and so our minds, but can the internet mold our minds? Nicholas Carr and Michael Rosenwald support the idea that the reading we do online is making it harder to be able to sit down with a good book. In their papers they discuss the downfalls of using the web. While on the other hand author Clay Shirky challenges that thought in his piece. Shirky directly battles the idea that the internet is damaging our brains by suggesting that internet use can be insightful. In this essay I will evaluate all three articles and expose their strengths and weaknesses then add my own take on the situation. First is Nicolas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In the article Carr discussed the damage we are doing to our brains …show more content…

He explains in his piece that people fear change and don’t want to fix what is not broken. To support his paper Shirky uses historic facts and current web habits of people in todays society. Shirky uses the invention of the printing press as an example of how people hate change, describing when the printing press was created people feared that the new found medium would get out of control. It did, but among the chaos came novels and scientific journals. This invention further aided in the technology we have today. Without the printing press we would never gotten to have the internet. These things helped educate people who couldn’t afford schooling. Much like today when people don’t know how to do something we look it up and learn about the subject. It is just a different way of learning then people did back then. While this paper does challenges Carr’s and Rosenwald’s argument it loses on some accounts due to Shirky taking more of a personal stance on the matter. While Carr provides the what and Rosenwald provides the how, there was not mush Shirky brought to the table in the ways of research. This is the biggest downfall of this essay. Another downfall was that the undeniable fact that there is too much of a surplus of irrelevant information out there on the …show more content…

The argument that the web is to blame for making us dumb by Nicholas Carr convinces his audience that they might succumb to becoming braindead due to excessive online clicking. Hopping from link to link never fully understanding the content. While Michael Rosenwald points out that we are slowly molding the brain to only skim and search for key words to put together. With these two programed ways our brains work soon libraries and book stores will cease to exist. Or will they? Clay Shirky challenges this thought by saying that among the cat videos and conspiracy theories there lies true gold within the websites of the internet. The gold consists of scientific journals and a place to discuss anything and everything. A community to share ideas and culture. Has the internet changed your brain for the

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