Analysis Of Is Google Making USupid? By Nicholas Carr

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Since the internet's creation, it has been used as a tool to make life easier for the people, but at what cost? In Nicholas Carr's essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he claims that “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away [at his] capacity for concentration and contemplation. [Carr’s] mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles” (Carr 610). Carr is not the only person who notices this dramatic change of his brains; many authors, scientists, and teachers have also witnessed the neurological effect in which the internet has caused. However, the internet is not the sole fault of this change, social media has changed the brain’s functions as well. The internet and social …show more content…

In Hermann Maurer’s, “Does the Internet Make Us Stupid?” he shows that Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist and professor at the University of California in San Francisco is “profoundly worried about the cognitive consequences of the constant distraction and interruptions the Net bombards us with. The long term effect on the quality of our intellectual lives could be ‘deadly’”(Maurer 49). If an expert in the brain field is worried, then others should also be more cautious about the devices they use. Mark Becker suggests that “media multitasking may be uniquely associated with deficits in basic cognitive processes such as the ability to successfully filter out irrelevant information and ignore distraction” (Becker 132). People do not give one task their full attention, they are always multitasking such as doing homework while texting and listening to music. People think multitasking will help them complete tasks quicker; however, in the long run they are changing the functions of their brain and even damaging it. According to Nicholas Carr in his novel “The Shallows”:
The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. ...the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted — to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering (Carr

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