Assignment #1 Summary and Analysis Nicholas Carr published an article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” on the July/August 2008 issue of the Atlantic. In it, he discusses the continuing issue of how technological advances, such as the internet, have shaped the way we think and gain knowledge. Carr compares different instances of this situation throughout history in the attempt to see whether or not, an unlimited access to human information has altered the way we learn about the world. He describes that: “For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind”. Afterwards, Carr writes that this medium may be influencing our capacity for
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He and his colleagues agree that the more they use the internet, the more they seem to skim through long articles and blog posts without doing any kind of deep reading or letting themselves be immersed into a book. This has lead Carr to suggest that the Internet may have been giving us as a distracting convenience that pulls us away from being fully absorbed into what we read. There is one particular quote from the text that I think it could help to illustrate his point: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Carr also uses numerous scientific sources from neuro-scientists and experts to back up his claim, the point of view that I found the most interesting is from Joseph Weizenbaum, who argued how in history, other technologies have shaped the way we think and act in the past, such as the clock. He states that before timekeeping, we performed activities without having a clear idea of what was the exact time: “In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our …show more content…
His intention would be to share about his personal experience, some historical facts and also some scientific evidence in order to support his idea that in the age of information, we are mostly incapable of reading a complex article or piece of literature. His audience is mostly directed towards students and scholars who surf the internet for long periods of time. We could say this because for the most part he uses academic vocabulary and situations that a modern day student could familiarize with. Nicholas Carr has achieved his purpose because he uses examples and concepts that made me rethink about the Internets potential for an accessible source of information, even if it comes at a price. I would say that this is a very urgent matter and I even found some of Carr 's evidence a bit unsettling. How we gain knowledge is mostly shaped by the way we access it, we can see that our current generation does not exactly have the attention span to go trough an interesting article or book that may help them discover something new, instead most of them would rather get distracted by the immense amount of entertainment that the internet provides. I say this because I was a bit scandalized by Google 's view about information that Carr described: “In Google 's view, information is a kind of commodity, a
He and his colleagues agree that the more they use the internet, the more they seem to skim through long articles and blog posts without doing any kind of deep reading or letting themselves be immersed into a book. This has lead Carr to suggest that the Internet may have been giving us as a distracting convenience that pulls us away from being fully absorbed into what we read. There is one particular quote from the text that I think it could help to illustrate his point: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Carr also uses numerous scientific sources from neuro-scientists and experts to back up his claim, the point of view that I found the most interesting is from Joseph Weizenbaum, who argued how in history, other technologies have shaped the way we think and act in the past, such as the clock. He states that before timekeeping, we performed activities without having a clear idea of what was the exact time: “In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our …show more content…
His intention would be to share about his personal experience, some historical facts and also some scientific evidence in order to support his idea that in the age of information, we are mostly incapable of reading a complex article or piece of literature. His audience is mostly directed towards students and scholars who surf the internet for long periods of time. We could say this because for the most part he uses academic vocabulary and situations that a modern day student could familiarize with. Nicholas Carr has achieved his purpose because he uses examples and concepts that made me rethink about the Internets potential for an accessible source of information, even if it comes at a price. I would say that this is a very urgent matter and I even found some of Carr 's evidence a bit unsettling. How we gain knowledge is mostly shaped by the way we access it, we can see that our current generation does not exactly have the attention span to go trough an interesting article or book that may help them discover something new, instead most of them would rather get distracted by the immense amount of entertainment that the internet provides. I say this because I was a bit scandalized by Google 's view about information that Carr described: “In Google 's view, information is a kind of commodity, a