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Negative effects of technology on the brain
Negative effects of technology on the brain
How technology affects the brain
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Google Is Making People Lazy In his essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr shows great concern about the advancement of technology. In this controversial article, Carr points out the negative and long-term effects that Google may bring to humans. Although Google provides convenient access for people to get the information, people’s way of thinking has been altered and harmed by Google. Whether Google has made us smart or stupid is a controversial topic in recent years that leads to a wide range of discussion. On one hand, supporters insist that Google is a quick and convenient tool that extends people’s degree of knowledge in a way has never happened before. On the other hand, opponents state that it is because of Google’s …show more content…
powerful storage of information that people lose their ability to think and to use their memory to grasp knowledge. If Google has been created to help people, how can it be the reason people act stupid? Google is not making us stupid, but Google is indeed making us more and more lazy. First of all, Google is just a tool that provides service to the public, how it works totally depends on the users.
Google as a search engine, it provides a tool, or a kind of technology to help users get quick access to the information. It is essentially an inanimate tool that is used by humans, and is unable to make decisions for them. Just as somebody kills a person with a knife, can people blame the knife for committing the crime? The answer is no, because without the knife, the criminal can still find another weapon to continue his crime. During that process, the knife is no more than an object that functions according to people’s mind. The idea can apply to Google as well. The related problems are not Google’s fault, but exactly the results of how people use …show more content…
it. Secondly, the reasons Carr gives are incomplete. According to Carr, Google harms our brain in two ways. The first one is the inability to concentrate, and the second one is the lack of depth in contemplation. First, we need to understand what is the definition of smart. According to the Oxford Dictionary, smart means having or showing a quick-witted intelligence. Intelligence refers to having good understanding or a high mental capacity, quick to comprehend, as persons or animals. It mainly concludes 4 aspects: perception, consciousness, self-awareness, and volition (Oxford Dictionary). What Carr means we can summarize into the lower degree of volition and consciousness. Therefore, he concludes that Google is making us stupid. Just like he said, some users (including myself) indeed appear to have the above problems after their long-term use of Google searching. However, the reasons he gives for the conclusion only focus on 2 aspects, which are incomplete. Conversely, from the angle of function, Google is helping people to broaden their vision and improve their perception. How can he make a conclusion that Google is making us stupid? Therefore, the conclusion that Google is making us stupid is incorrect. What truly make the public lose their patience and concentration is the fast pace living of the society. Since humans enter 2000s, the living pace becomes more and more fast, accomplishing the higher level of competition stress. In this stressful situation, people try their best to fulfill biggest desires in a shorter time. Doing fast and getting more has became the latest living style of general people. With this “fast is best” principle, people quicken their speed to absorb knowledge, so they “zip along the surface like a guy in Jet Ski” (Carr 57). Reading now has become a battle, during which their eyes move swiftly to search keywords, get the main meaning, and then flip to the next sentence. In addition, the range of reading also largely expands, with the performance that people go on to the next related article even before they finish the former one. The advancement in speed and range guaranteed people’s cover of information, but respectively, it limits the depth in understanding connections between source and source. If people want to fully master the knowledge, then a certain period of time spent in contemplation is necessary. “Human memory is not the same as the memory in a computer: it’s through remembering that we make connections with what we know, what we feel, and this gives rise to personal knowledge. If we’re not forming rich connections in our own minds, we’re not creating knowledge” (Carr 63). Without the investment of time, knowledge will only stay on the surface, but not truly go inside people’s brains. Although people get the answer, they don’t learn anything at all. What they do in the reading process is like a scanner, transforming the words from one place to another place, but never store them. For the people only pursuit speed, all the information across through their eyes is just the sum of words, have no understanding or any inspiration. Therefore, it is the fast pace of society that results in their lack of understanding in information. In addition, given the huge amount of information today, people also don’t have enough time and energy to deal with all the routine information they came across.
As all know, people live in a period of information explosion. Everyday, they are flooded by each kind of information, newspaper, magazine, movies and on and on. A report published by the University of California, San Diego, points out that the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day (“The American Diet”). IDC’s statistics also found that, “amount of data created and replicated has already reached top 1.8 zettabytes, or 1.8 billion TBs, in 2011” and by 2020, the total amount of global digital information will reach 35 zettabytes (Ron, A12). Such great amount of information totally out of the range that people can handle, and eventually create huge stress on people’s brains. In this situation, it is difficult and impossible for people to give equal attention to each piece of information as before. In other words, people sacrifice the depth of contemplation in change of the range of reading, but that is
inevitable. As mentioned above, Google is not making people stupid, but is it totally or unrelated? The answer is no. In some sense, Google as a tool, how it functions indeed changes people’s reading habit even lifestyle in a certain degree. Let us recall what people did for collecting information before the birth of Google. When they had a question, they read the books to search the answer. But because they had no idea of which page lends to related information, sometimes they had to glance over the whole book to deal with such a simple question. When it came to a research paper, the task would be much more complicated. However, after Google came to life, what they need to do is just to type in keywords, press enter, and then millions of results will come out by themselves in less than 1 seconds. In addition, when they plug in a keyword in Google, the smart system can guess what they want immediately and pop out several related phrases they even didn’t think of before. Google has reached the status that it even knows more about people than they do about themselves. Google is such a powerful search engine that it stores all the information collected by the predecessors and then spread it in a super convenient way. People don’t need to waste time and effort to find it or memorize it any more. They get the answer out easily instead out caring the process of how it comes out. Gradually, people get used to the way that Google thinks for them, and feel more and more comfortable to ask Google every time they meet questions rather than asking themselves. Nowadays, memory seems less important than before and what between people and knowledge has become just several clicks on Google. In fact, people are able to solve the problems by themselves, but they are just unwilling to do it. They feel impatient to do the research, to memorize and to form the connections in their minds. Compared to the quick and accurate outcomes of Google, people always afraid that they will make mistakes. In their mind, Google is far more reliable than people themselves. Although Google save people’s time and effort, it also makes people lose their confidence and become lazy-minded. However, it is people’s lazy-mind pushes Google to be more and more powerful. In this decade, the functions of Google grew more and more diverse. When people need accurate calculated results, Google improves its searching algorithm. When they need higher related searching outcomes, Google provides some professional separated searching engines, like Google Scholar and Google University. When they need to know a special event in the past, Google releases its Wayback Machine. All of these kind of examples show that, people desire to get the information more convenient, more comfortable and much faster. It is exactly their ever-increasing demands that push Google stronger, more intellectual and easier to use. Conversely, Google’s increasing intelligence also pushes people towards the path of laziness. Without people’s laziness, the desire for quick access to information would not exist, then Google would not exist, either; Without Google’s powerful function, people would still spend time and effort on searching the information among various books, instead of doing other more valuable things, and the society would stop progress. People’s minds tangle with the machine’s intention. They are tightly related, developed and changed by each other, and advance the society together. But which technology doesn’t? Let us think it deeper. For example, cellphone, people’s desires for instant communication, urge the advanced development of cellphone. However, the powerful functions of cellphone conversely change people’s communication habit, making them over focused on the cellphone. Some people even rather look at the screen all day long, than going outside to meet their friends. This kind of change, the public also never anticipates before, but it is inevitable, because this is what the progress of society represents. When people are improving technology, making technology more and more advanced, technology is also insidiously changing the society, in the way that urges people to adapt it and to rely on it. In conclusion, people need to start from themselves to overcome their reliance on Google. From the angle of psychology, Google indeed encourages people’s laziness and the attitude of getting something without effort, but from the angle of function, Google is helpful to people instead of harmful. If people can use it in a proper way, Google can be people’s good friend. Instead of blaming Google for affecting us in a negative way, people could view Google as their assistant that could offer quick access to information. Only in this way, can Google and people advance together.
In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” the reader finds all three methods of persuasion, ethos, pathos, and logos in emphasizing his point that Google is possibly making people stupid; but it is ultimately the people who cause their own mental deterioration. His persuasion is a reminder to people of the importance of falling back on the “traditional” ways of reading. He also understands that in skimming an article one has the ability to retain what is necessary. Carr himself points out that in the past he was better able to focus on what he read and retain the information. However, now he exercises the process of browsing and skimming over information, just as many individuals have come to do in this day and age.
In composing “Is Google Making Us More Stupid” Nicholas Carr wants his audience to be feared by the internet while at the same time he wants his work to seem more creditable. Nicholas Carr uses many different types of evidence to show us that we should be scared and feared as well as his credibility. Carr’s audience is people who think like him, who find themselves getting lost on the internet while reading something, someone who is educated and uses the internet to look up the answers to questions or to read an article or book.
Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, Nicholas Carr in his article, Is Google is making us stupid?, addresses his beliefs that the internet is creating artificial intelligence as it effects our mind and the way we think. Throughout the article Carr supports this claim with rhetorical devices as well as Aristotelian appeals. Carr begins by using pathos by stating an anecdote from a scene in the movie A Space Odyssey, then uses logos by stating factual evidence and statistics, lastly Carr uses ethos by conceding to opposition and stating appropriate vocabulary. In the article he compares the past and present and how the Internet has changed not only himself, but also people as a whole. In order to show his credibility, Carr uses research and
Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and Sherry Turkle’s “How Computers Change the Way We Think” both discuss the influence of technology to their own understanding and perspective. The first work by Nicholas Carr is about the impact technology has on his mind. He is skeptical about the effect it could cause in the long term of it. He gives credible facts and studies done to prove his point. While Sherry Turkle’s work gives a broad idea of the impact of technology has caused through the years. She talks about the advances in technology and how it is changing how people communicate, learn and think. In both works “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and “How Computers Change the Way We Think” the authors present
If you find yourself skimming through pages, looking for bullet points and your mind wandering off, you might be suffering the effects of Google making you stupid. These are the things that Nicholas Carr talks about in his essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was originally published in July 2008 in Atlantic magazine. Carr argues that the use of technology on the daily basis has made us unable to go into deeper thought about things. Along with the opinion of Scientists and other “literary types” he asserts that the web has indeed made us change the way we think. Power Browsing is the new way people are reading, this is where you look from title to title, surfing the web from link to link. Overall, he advocates that eventually our brains will
According to www.telegraph.co.uk, “[y]oung people aged between 16 and 24 spend more than 27 hours a week on the internet.” Certainly this much internet usage would have an effect on someone. What exactly is the effect of using the internet too much? Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” argues that we are too reliant on the internet and it is making the us dim-witted and shortens our attention span. While Clive Thompson’s article “Smarter than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better” states that technology is not only a collection of knowledge, it also a method of sharing and recording our own knowledge. I fall between both Carr and Thompson. I agree with car on his points of us being too reliant on the internet but disagree when he states that it is making us less intelligent. Meanwhile, I also support Thompson’s statement that the internet allows us to assimilate vast amounts of knowledge but disagree with his opinion on how we should be reliant on
Humans have been creating tools that allow us to be do things that would be otherwise impossible since the beginning of our existence. The ability to use and develop new tools is what sets us apart from all other animals. Yet it seems that ever since these tools started being created there were also people that feared these new tools and claimed that they are bad for the human race. The present fear of new technology is illustrated in the essay “Is Google Making us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. In this essay Carr argues that the internet and other new technologies are changing the way we think in a negative way. Carr claims that new technology is making our generation stupid. In opposition the article “Smarter Than You Think” by Clive Thompson
The following essay will discuss how the ideas in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, is expressed in the futuristic novel Feed, by M.T Anderson.
With the rise of technology and the staggering availability of information, the digital age has come about in full force, and will only grow from here. Any individual with an internet connection has a vast amount of knowledge at his fingertips. As long as one is online, he is mere clicks away from Wikipedia or Google, which allows him to find what he needs to know. Despite this, Nicholas Carr questions whether Google has a positive impact on the way people take in information. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr explores the internet’s impact on the way people read. He argues that the availability of so much information has diminished the ability to concentrate on reading, referencing stories of literary types who no longer have the capacity to sit down and read a book, as well as his own personal experiences with this issue. The internet presents tons of data at once, and it is Carr’s assumption that our brains will slowly become wired to better receive this information.
Carr explains how the internet can distract us making it harder to focus on tasks. He explains how processing information has become harder. Notifications, ads, popups can make it difficult if you are trying to read an article or book (Carr 57). The internet has become the center of our attention (Carr 57). Carr is explaining how this is the reason why we are struggling to comprehend a certain piece of information. He adds in his article that scientists, researchers and educators have also noticed the difference in concentration. And in further detail, he explains that we fail to see the important information, thus affecting cognition. He says that the information we gather is not valuable unless we know the meaning behind it. Carr concludes with explaining that the more the internet evolves the less valuable information is to
Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid." July/August 2008. The Alantic Magazine. 20 February 2012 .
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr and “How Computers Change the Way We Think” by Sherry Turkle are two articles that explore how technology influences our daily lives. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” discusses the effects of the internet in our society, how it is robbing us of our deep thoughts, memories and our ability to read books. Carr also talks about how the internet has become our primary source of getting information. The writer also discusses about how he’s having difficulty focusing on reading. “How Computers Change the Way We Think” is talking about how people don’t use their brains full potential capacity to solve problems. Instead, we depend on technology to do that for us.
Steven Pinker and Nicholas Carr share their opposing views on the effects that mass media can have on the brain. In Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” it explores his viewpoints on how increased computer use affects our thought process in a negative manner. Carr critically analyzes that having widespread access to the internet via the internet has done more harm by disabling our ability to think complexly like it is the researching in a library. On the other hand, Pinker expresses how the media improves our brain’s cognitive functions. Pinker expresses that we should embrace the new technological advances and all we need is willpower to not get carried away in the media. Although both authors bring very valid arguments
If only my local library could hold the vast quantity of information that my hand held smart phone does. Carr insinuates that Google (and the internet) is making us stupid. I say they are making us lazy. In “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr informatively states that with the advancement of technology, Google search engine, and the internet we are become more distracted—with all the different forms of flash media, the amount of hyper-links after hyper-link after hyper-links, and clickable adds-- in turn we are doing less critical reading by way of the internet as opposed to a printed book. Being able to glance over several articles in hour’s verses days looking through books; being able to jump from link to link in order to get the information you need, never looking at the same page twice has decrease out deep thinking and reading skills. Now days, all forms of reading, e.g. newspaper, magazine, etc. are small amount of reading to get the main idea of what’s going on and if you would like more information you will have to go to another page to do so. In the end, C...
Although the Internet is very helpful and has created many technological advances, we as humans are not created to function like a computer. Our minds require deep thought, human interaction, and thorough knowledge of things so we can remember and fully understand concepts. The Internet in itself is a very helpful tool. The advances that have fallowed are truly amazing, along with vast array of information available. Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” is very flawed and does not provided adequate resources to back up his claims. That being said, Carr points out things that might otherwise have been looked over and accepted as normal. His question is sincere, thought provoking, and one we all should be asking ourselves before its too late.