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Impacts of the internet on society
Effects of the Internet in the modern world
Impacts of the internet on society
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Essay Five
People are uncomfortable with internet technology. In his essay, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, Malcolm Gladwell states the rise of technology and social media use in our society leads to less effort being expended on important causes. Nicholas Carr continues Gladwell’s opinion of the deterioration that the internet causes. In his essay Is Google Making Us Stupid he quotes Richard Foreman saying “we risk becoming ‘pancake people’ spread wide and thin,” and implies the internet is an unnecessary crutch that weakens us. Though not everyone is under the impression that the internet causes an intellectual deterioration, some are concerned it helps dangerous causes. In the article, “Terror on Twitter,”
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Gladwell says that the difference between these two eras is that activism is less accountable. Back then, movements and causes spread like wildfire, and people who join feel personally involved in the furthering of their cause. With the internet, people spread the accountability among their fellow activists. For instance, there is no accountability if they don’t show up to a rally or protest. The lack of effort that results in more people joining a cause, could be called could be called “teamwork effect,” which Gladwell holds in high disregard. However at the same time of this “teamwork effect,” there are more people informed about movements than before. People who may never have been aware of a movement’s cause can now be made aware. During the 1960s people did not have the same access to information as they do today. This alone leads to more support and awareness which negates any concerns Gladwell has about social media accountability. Now there are more people, and also more power in current movements than there is in the …show more content…
Like Gladwell, Nicholas Carr believes the internet has negative effects. In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Carr attempts to show as the internet becomes our primary source of information, it diminishes the ability to read books and extensive research. Carr goes on to give a very well researched account of how text on the internet is designed make browsing fast and profitable. He describes how the design for skimming affects our thinking skills and attention spans. He wraps up his argument by describing what we are losing in the shift toward using the internet as our main information source. Carr suggests the learning process that occurs in extensive research and through reading is lost. While the learning process can be beneficial to scholars and intellectuals, not everyone has the capability to follow through with it. The internet offers an education that anyone can have access to and understand. Also if Carr believes the learning process is better, this option is always available for people who want to learn according to this scholarly principal. However, for the rest of the population the quick and easy access has allowed the average population to become more educated, and to expose themselves to aspects of academia that previously is reserved for
Malcolm Gladwell’s article "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted" raises a significant question about the prospective contribution of web-based social networking to the advent of progressive social movement and change. Gladwell bold declaration that "the revolution will not be tweeted" is reflective of his view that social media has no useful application in serious activism. Contrasting various elements of the “high-stakes” lunch-counter protests in Greensboro, North Carolina in the 1960’s with the “low-stakes” activism achieved through social media, Gladwell concludes that effective social movements powerful enough to impose change on longstanding societal forces require both “strong ties” among participants and the presence of a hierarchical organizations. In contrast, Gladwell characterizes the social networks as an interwoven web of "weak ties" that is inherently devoid of a hierarchy. Gladwell’s prerequisites for social movement are firmly based in strong body of sociological evidence, but his views regarding the nature of online social networks are laughably lacking in foresight and obstructed by a misleadingly selective body of evidence.
In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Carr concerns about spending too much time on web, making people lose the patient and ability to read and think and changing people’s thinking behaviors. He gives so many points: he can not read lengthy article used to be easy; many author begin to feel that too much reading online let them hard to read and absorb a longish article; we put efficiency and immediacy above understanding when we read; The circuits in brain has been altered by reading habit.
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.
In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (2008), Carr maintains that the advent of the Internet has produced a shallow generation of information customers who lack the ability to deeply engage with and critically think about a text. To support his argument, Carr draws on personal and historical anecdotes and one study. By writing this article, Carr aims to open a dialogue about the potentially adverse effects the Internet could have on peoples’ cognitive processes. Carr establishes an informal relationship with the audience, which is primarily composed of well-educated individuals. Because this audience is educated, they are capable of critical thinking. However, because they are humans they are easily
Technology has had a negative impact on this generation- we have lost and forgotten many things because of it. In Malcolm Gladwell’s “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”, he discusses the difference between social media activism and “real” activism and the loss of human connection that he has identified. He believes that with social media activism, we lack the connections a community should have because we don’t get together in person- we are satisfied with being connected through technology. He also thinks that as time goes on, we will only get worse when referring to the ideas that we are delusional because the issues we fight about (such as getting phones taken away) aren’t as important as we think.
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
There’s a lot of controversy about the internet transforming and changing our brains drastically, but not in a proper way. Is Google making us stupid? Many people believe this to be true, and it has been proven time and time again. This article was written in July and August of 2008 by Nicholas Carr, and he argues the statement that over many years, reading and writing has rehabilitated a lot because everything used to be written on paper and people’s focus was improved while reading on paper, but now everyone writes articles online, and it is more difficult to focus while reading, because there are many sites to look at and read, so many people just skip from article to article without ever thoroughly evaluating
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
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.
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.
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
Carr provides us scientific information that proves his point. ““We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged” (Carr 3). Carr gives us information from Tufts University, that contribute to his point. This information tells us that the internet weakens our capacity for reading. That is what Carr is saying, that’s the point of all of this. Carr wrote this so he can inform us how google in affecting
Nowadays people don’t bother sitting down and going through an article or book from page to page, because it’s not a good use of their time as they can get all information faster through the web. By examining the behaviors of computer users, both authors argue that people don’t really care about deep knowledge of what they are learning or reading. People want to know how things work or are connected in an instant. They feel that they don't need to critically think about the information to help get them along in life. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” supports this claim by citing a scientific study from the University College London were the researchers examined the behavior of visitors to a couple popular websites and found that people using the sites displayed skimming activity (41). The users of the sites did not bother taking the time to read the articles, but they instead power browsed, jumping from one site to the other and hardly returning to the websites they had already visited. In addition, the internet has made people accustomed to new reading styles that people don’t fully comprehend or absorb material. They read things for apparent meaning. Carr also says “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”
The article by Nicholas Carr Is Google Making Us Stupid, Carr main argument is as the Internet has become an integral part of our society is changing the way we process information to a simply way of processing information. My interpretation of Carr main argument is that the Internet has made it harder to process complex information and now rendering to process information in a simply manor. The reason he accomplished expressing his argument in a effective manor was his use appeal to Karos, Ethos & Logos; also, with the aid of rhetorical devices.
Nicholas Carrs article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” makes points that I agree with, although I find his sources to be questionable. The article discusses the effects that the Internet may be having on our ability to focus, the difference in knowledge that we now have, and our reliance on the Internet. The points that are made throughout Carrs article are very thought provoking but his sources make them seem invaluable.