The internet is one of the most revolutionary inventions of all time. The web makes it easier than ever to connect with other people, whether that person is on the other side of town or the other side of the world. We can instantly share what is going on in our life with a click of a mouse, we can do our banking on the internet, watch movies, and shop on the web. Despite being the most revolutionary invention ever, the internet does have an effect on the way we think and do work. In Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows,” he claims that the internet “promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning” (Carr 116). He uses this statement to say that it is harder to read deeply on the internet as opposed to books, because …show more content…
our senses are overloaded. Carr’s main argument that the internet is making it harder for us to read deeper, and in a sense, less intelligent. I agree that the internet makes it harder to read deeply, but the internet also makes us more intelligent in a different way, because it improves other skills like skimming. In “The Shallows,” Carr says that we are not reading as deep and we find it harder to read is because when we use the internet we have a high cognitive load (Carr 125).
Cognitive load is information from a source flowing into our brain. This overload comes from the fact that when we use the internet, we use most of our senses except smell and taste (Carr 117). The reason that this makes it much harder to read deep on the internet is that on the internet there is much more to take in, stuff ranging from links, pictures, video or audio. Following this, Carr brings up why these are so distracting to us, even if we do not click on the source, “Whenever we, as readers, come upon a link, we have to pause, for at least a split second, to allow our prefrontal cortex to evaluate whether or not we should click on it” (Carr …show more content…
122). Our ability to think and read deeply also depends on our short term and long term memory and how those two work in conjunction with each other (Carr 124).
When we are on the internet our working memory (short term memory) is overloaded and few things go into our long term memory (Carr 125). A study to support this was conducted by psychology professor Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University. In the study she found that answers are not remembered as much when read from the web (Psychology Today). Carr equates this to “…reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle” (Carr 126). I do agree that the internet can make it harder to focus due to all the ways it can distract you, and Carr brings up good evidence of this. Carr states on the subject of hyperlinks, “Evaluating links and navigating a path through them, it turned out, involves mentally demanding problem solving tasks that are extraneous to the act of reading itself” (Carr 126). Even right now as I am writing this paper I am being somewhat distracted by a Youtube video. Although the internet can be fairly distracting, it can improve many aspects of thinking and
reading. The internet improves many aspects of reading and thinking, such as skimming, hand eye coordination, and reaction time. I believe the improvement in our skimming skills comes from the fact that stuff is shortened on the internet such as news articles. Even Carr himself states that skimming can be just as important as deep reading (Carr 138). Since the internet make it easier to skim materials, thus concluding if something is a reliable source at a much faster rate (Carr 139). Carr does bring a fair argument that relying on skimming too much can be a bad thing. Using a 2006 study by Jakob Nielson that was found true by the Software Usability Reasearch Laboratory of Wichita State University, Carr uses the argument that we are not reading online articles the same way we would read a book, we read it in an “F” pattern (Nielson 2006, Shrestha, Lenz 2007, pg 134-135). While I do believe that the internet can make it harder for people to be patient readers, the internet can make us smarter people in different ways. In a response to David Carr’s “Is Google Making us Stupid,” Phil Davis says because we have “More connections to documents, artifacts, and people means more external influences on my thinking and thus on my writing” (Phil Davis). But Davis does nevertheless concur with Carr that the internet has made him more impatient (Phil Davis). I agree completely agree with Davis on his point that easier access to documents. Having more access to documents that we can gain information from them in minutes. But on the other hand, the more knowledge we have on various subjects, the more the information is spread out. Although the internet may be distracting when on it, I do believe the internet makes us smarter by giving us more access to documents on the internet. Even though the internet still makes us smarter in that sense, I do agree with Carr that the internet akes it harder for us to read, especially on the internet, because of the condensing of a lot of material.
The social generation has taken over. If you don’t tweet on the daily, receive dozens of instagram likes, or know what the heck Tumblr is, you better get Googling because you’ve been left behind. It’s easy to get caught up in all the likes, retweets, comments, and ratings. We seem to need this sense of validation through numbers. We are never offline, we are permanently logged in. In Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows he searches for the consequences in the power of technology.
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
He states how he used to spend hours reading, but his concentration started to drift after two or three pages. He backed up his theory with stories from others who say they’re experiencing the same thing. But they still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how the internet affects cognition. After a brief history lesson, Carr starts to incorporate Google into the article. He tells us about Google’s history and their mission.
In Nicholas Carr’s “Hal and Me,” an excerpt from The Shallows, Carr highlights his experience with the internet and his perspective on how the internet affects a person’s capacity of reading and absorbing information. Using his and others’ perspectives, Carr is able to write in a practical method, to which his audience can understand the impact of the internet in a relatable context.
In The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, he asserts that the evolution of information and communication technology (ICTs) is having a detrimental impact on our brains despite the many benefits and advances we have made with it. His main focus is on the internet which he commonly refers to as the “universal medium” (92). Carr presents a very detailed but biased argument in which he views the internet and other technologies as the adversary of critical thinking and progress. To Carr, we are sacrificing our ability to think logically because we are choosing the simpler way to gain knowledge.
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.
The internet is our conduit for accessing a wide variety of information. In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr discusses how the use of the internet affects our thought process in being unable to focus on books or longer pieces of writing. The author feels that “someone, or something, has been tinkering with [his] brain” over the past few years (Carr 731). While he was easily able to delve into books and longer articles, Carr noticed a change in his research techniques after starting to use the internet. He found that his “concentration often [started] to drift after two or three pages” and it was a struggle to go back to the text (Carr 732). His assertion is that the neural circuits in his brain have changed as a result of surfing endlessly on the internet doing research. He supports this statement by explaining how his fellow writers have had similar experiences in being unable to maintain their concentrations. In analyzing Carr’s argument, I disagree that the internet is slowly degrading our capacity for deep reading and thinking, thereby making us dumber. The Web and Google, indeed, are making us smarter by allowing us access to information through a rapid exchange of ideas and promoting the creativity and individualization of learning.
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
I’m scrolling through the articles on Snapchat and find my way across one with an intriguing title, I instantly tap on it. I begin to scroll further down only to find myself going through extensive paragraphs of information and suddenly this article that seemed so interesting became a bore. In Nicholas G. Carr’s novel, The Shallows, he argues the internet is creating more problems to us humans than actual benefits. Our social skills are starting to lack and our interaction with technology is beginning to heighten. Humans contemplative skills are slowly fading away due to our reliance on the internet to solve our problems. Technology is inevitable by humans, seeing that individuals use it in their everyday lives. Unfortunately, this is a problem considering the use of high-tech gadgets decrease in one’s capacity for concentration, contemplation, and personal memory.
Moreover, Carr’s article mentions that by using technology of any kind, users tend to embody the characteristics stimulated by that technology. He says that given that the Internet processes information almost immediately, users will tend to value immediacy. To explain, Carr gives the example of a friend of his named Scott Karp who was a literary major on college and who used to be an avid book reader. However, since the arrival of the Internet, Karp skim articles online because he could no longer read as much as he used too. He cannot pay attention and absorb long texts ever since he read online articles. Internet...
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
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.”
Although the Internet has increased how much we read, it has deteriorated our concentration level. We are no longer able to read long passages and stay interested. We have resorted to skimming or finding a shorter version. It has also affected our ability to take an analytical approach to what we read. We no longer go beyond comprehending the information we take in. Outside of using the Internet to “enhance” our mind, Carr has also made the point that it is a daily involvement. We incorporate it in our everyday lives, because it is a source of entertainment or serves as some type of convenience for us.
Society is moving from a multidimensional approach to gathering information to relying on the Internet as our main conduit of information. The advantages (ease of use, instant availability) seem attractive, which leads to widespread adoption, but the interface itself may limit our intellectual capacity. As Carr observes from media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s work, “media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought” (Carr). Because reading is not an automatic skill for humans, but a learned behavior, our flexible brains may well be building a different cognitive framework to process the new format.