Nicholas_Carr

Nicholas Carr In “What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains: Is Google Making Us Stupid'” Nicholas Carr’s thesis is our use of the Internet is turning us into a species of shallow thinkers. In his article, Carr discusses how the internet is changing the way we think and how we use are minds. He talks about his own experience and other individuals who are starting to find it difficult to read long articles. He also discusses how the internet is eligibly changing the way are brains function and receives information. For more than ten years, Carr has spent a great deal of his time online, searching, surfing, and sometimes adding to the internet’s archives. Research now takes minutes, instead of days going through information in a library room. Even when Carr is not working he is more than likely on the internet, reading, sending e-mails, watching videos, etc. His mind expects to promptly receive information, the same way it is delivered online. It seems that the internet is hindering Carr’s ability to concentrate and contemplate. Bruce Fieldman is a blogger who regularly blogs about the use of computers in medicine. Fieldman expresses how the internet has altered his mental habit. He can no longer read a long article anymore, just reading 3 – 4 paragraphs has become a challenge. Fieldman jumps from source to source online, skimming through short passages, which, a pathologist who is on the faculty at the University of Michigan Medical School, refers to Fieldman’s thinking as having a staccato quality. Maryanne Wolf is a developmental psychologist at Tufts University. Reading does not come naturally for humans; we have to teach our minds to translate the characters of the language we understand. Wolf believes that “we are what we read,” our internet style, efficiency, and immediacy have hindered our ability for deep reading. Now-a-days, we are just simply decoding information we read, not understanding the text. The internet has really big effect on the way we think. Other media sources have to adapt to these changes; television programs add text crawls and ad pop-ups, magazines and newspaper shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd pages with easy-to browse info-snippets. I have a mutual feeling about Carr’s thesis; our use of the Internet is turning us into a species of shallow thinkers. I grew up with the internet, so I can’t compare how I may have done activities without the internet to how I do activities with the internet. Just like Bruce Fieldman, I also have trouble reading long articles and skim from web page to webpage reading a little bit from each page. Although, if it is something that is interesting to me I can read for hours, but I have a hard time finding a piece of literature that catches my attention like that.