Gary Small Summary

1. Harris uses the example of his nephew to begin his article because he wants to give an emotional example that the reader can easily relate to and feel emotion from. The reader strongly gets a sense of pathos from Harris, and can feel his disappointment along with him. His nephew is only two years old, so it is astonishing that he witnessed it himself and can verify that it is a true story. This example ties into Harris’s point that the young generations don’t know what it is like to not have technology around so they don’t think twice about what they are doing. They can’t imagine doing anything without the technology, and this can cause lasting effects in their lives to come.

2. UCLA’s Gary Small does an experiment where he is testing to

see if using the internet will reorganize how we use our brain. People who didn’t use the internet were given a brain scan while trying to go on the internet. The results were that there was minimal neural activity in the frontal lobes. Next, Small had the people practice on the internet for one hour a day for a week. Those scans had a dramatic increase in the activity in the frontal lobe while using the internet. This shows that the brain really does reform to the environment that it is placed in, even if it is only for one hour a day for a week. These changes are causing children’s brains to not function at its full capacity when it comes to things like deep thinking.

3.

Harris and Greenfield make many claims about how technology if negatively affecting children and their growth out of maturity and into real life. One of these is that the brain adapts to the things it experiences. Hours of internet use causes the brain to change itself to work best for internet use and not in the reality of the world. Also, if children are spending so much time on the internet, they are not going outside and getting sun, exercise, and excitement from the natural things around them. All of these things are important to the growth of a child. Children are also becoming unable to deeply think about their ideas and how to express them clearly. In line with that, they expect instant answers and quick rewards, therefore losing the ability to wait and be

patient.

4.

I feel like these claims appear to be very true amongst my life and the rest of the young population. Technology has taken away the personal touch from everyday things. Typing every emotion we have, whether it’s in a text or in and essay for school, has taken away some ability to connect with what we are saying and think deeper about it. Also, talking with someone through text is completely different from face to face. It takes a lot more effort to have a discussion in real life than to just type cute, short expressions and end it with a smiley face hoping that the person reading it understands what tone of voice you would use to say it because that can affect the meaning of a sentence greatly.

5. Some positive impacts that I feel like technology has had on my generations life is the easy access to ample amount of updates, specific information of fairly every topic imaginable. I feel like it promotes learning about anything and everything. In encyclopedias, information may be dated and the things that you are looking for may not even be in there. Also, encyclopedia’s take up a lot of room in order to have even a fraction of the information online. Another good use of technology is typing up essays so that teachers can easily read them and turning them in online to check for

plagiarism.

6. Harris ends his article with the idea that the road that technology is taking younger generations down in inevitable and cannot be stopped. It will happen sooner or later no matter what we do about it. I feel like that is most definitely true. The world has accepted technology with open arms. At first it was a supply to a necessity to get things done, but now it has become how much we can have computers do for use so we don’t have to do it. It is becoming ridiculous, but I don’t think it can or will be stopped.

7. In Barakat’s article, some more negative effects of technology are mentioned such as decrease in human interaction and ability to solve complex problems. Digital devices are making young generations not be able to focus long enough to do anything that takes a lot of thought and time. Technology has accustomed us with instant feedback, but that is not the reality of the real world, therefore hindering us for our future.