Essay Comparing Gladwell And Nicholas Carr

Both Nicholas Carr and Malcolm Gladwell debated how the Internet has affected humankind in both positive and negative ways. Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of Small Change:Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted. Nicholas Carr is a writer who has formerly written for the New York Times, The Guardian etc, he also wrote Is Google Making Us Stupid? Gladwell’s and Carr’s essays identifies how the internet has a damaging effect on people.
Gladwell’s essay discusses the developments of the social media and how it has changed social activism.”The platform of social media is based on weak ties”(Gladwell, page 174). He discusses how the Civil Rights Movement was based on strong ties among people who knew each other.People would rise up and join the revolution if they saw their friends, peers or neighbors in the news or newspapers. There is not much of a risk

to activate a cause online, people used to be willing to die for their cause. Nowadays, it is not the case. Fewer people take action although they spread the message “The things that King needed in Birmingham-discipline and strategies were things that online social media cannot provide” (page 179, Gladwell). He makes a good point, the internet is large and chaotic. There would be no way to organize all of it, let alone for a revolution

Carr’s essay identifies the impact of technology on the way people’s intelligence and makes the reader realize the impact it has on us. “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turn of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after the two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if
I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle” (Carr page 92). He discusses how the internet comes with a price.His mind cannot concentrate anymore, a blogger Bruce Friedman talks about how he used to be able to read long texts, now since the internet has been created he skims through articles.”That’s the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world. It is our intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”. We come to depend on the internet to get our information instead of looking for it ourselves and we don’t use your own intelligence enough.Before the internet, people used get their information from books. Now, we superficially understand things, people do not entirely comprehend what they read.
On the other hand, others might say that the internet has positively influenced mankind. True, we have learned a lot from the internet. We can get the same information from books, we would be using our own brains instead of letting the internet give all the answers or think for us. The internet cannot physically harm people, social activism in person does.The internet harms people in several other ways, such as cyberbullying.

The internet has given a wide path for people to do things they wouldn’t do in “real life”.They can openly support things, unlike in the Civil Rights Movement If people activated the Civil Rights Movement on the internet, it probably wouldn’t have succeeded.

The internet damages us, people have lost their ability to read full articles and don’t fully understand what they read and because of this,our natural intelligence will never be the same with the internet around, thinking for us.
In conclusion, Carr and Gladwell’s essays have proven that the internet positive effects are outweighed by its negative effects. Carr has found he is unable to finish a full text anymore or concentrate. He thinks that the internet has taken our natural intelligence and turned it into artificial intelligence. Gladwell discusses how nowadays, social activism doesn’t have the same risk or impact as former revolutions such as the Civil Rights Movement. The internet is mostly based on weak ties based among people who do not truly know each other and would not risk their lives for their

cause.