How Does Technology Affect Us

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The topic of controversy for this essay is whether or not technology has a negative or positive affect on people. In order to help explain whether or not technology has a positive or negative affect on us there will be four articles that will be discussed within this essay. The first article is “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens by Ferris Jabr, “Get Smarter” by Jamais Cascio, and “Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds” by Damon Darlin. Carr and Jabr’s articles say that technology does affect us negatively, while Cascio and Darlin say that technology affects us in a positive way. An interested, but uniformed person can learn most about this …show more content…
He suggests, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles” (Carr 2). He is suggesting that we are no longer able to think deeply or focus on lengthy readings due to the influence of the Internet and modern day technology. He mentions various resources that back up his claim, such as Google and various types of technological devices like the typewriter, the mechanical clock, and the printing press; each device changed the way the brain functioned. Google affects us in negative way because the information we search up leads to our minds becoming altered by the information presented. The typewriter changed the writing style, the mechanical clock control’s people’s minds, and the printing press was brought up due to the worry of people becoming lazy and unintellectual due to the easy access of …show more content…
Darlin is claiming that the use of the internet and technology does not affect/lower our intelligence, but they benefit us and the rest of world by saving us time. Within his article, Darlin mentions three various examples of how technology has benefited us; he mentions Google, the HP-35, and tax software. He says that Google saves our time when we need to find information on something. The HP-35 is the first hand-held scientific calculator that was made by Hewlett-Packard in 1972. Darlin says that some engineer professors banned this calculator in their classroom due to fear of engineering students relying on the calculator and forgetting how to do the calculation on paper. Although, he says that the HP-35 did not impede the engineer’s skills, it helped them become more productive on creatives devices such as IPods, cellphones, and high definition TV. As for the tax software, we are now able to do taxes in less time than we did before without it. Jabr says “The tedious job of filling a tax return no longer requires several evening, but just a few hours” (Darlin 2). Darlin goes on to say that the reason technology is viewed so negatively is due to occupation, he motions futurist Paul Saffo. Paul Saffo says that there are two types of occupations within the world, the engineers and the natural scientists.

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