Technological advances will continually happen for better or for worse. Google is without a doubt the most popular search engine in the world and a technological advancement that puts all sorts of information within our grasps. Nicholas Carr has written several books such as “IT Doesn’t Matter” and “Does IT Matter?” and he has his own blog in which he criticizes our supposed growing dependency on technology. He had different work such as “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” in which he was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer. Carr wrote the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” from The Atlantic 2008 July/ August edition where he explains that having information be so easily retrievable is affecting how we think and process
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Carr doesn’t believe that “Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine,” and that the technological changes seen throughout all of history have been seen with a great satisfaction or with massive opposition and this is no different(6). The strategy is picked to make it seem like there will be either a world where technology is used in a passive manner or technology takes control because of the dependence on it. The reader’s mind will process this and then think about the scenarios given rather than think about them for themselves, which shows the strong use of pathos because it is an appeal to his audiences fear to technology controlling us as a society. Carr’s use of the either or strategy was used effectively since he makes the two scenarios blatant to his audience and using other well-known professionals work to further his own. The author that promotes his point most effectively is a fellow colleague; Marryane Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University who bluntly states “We are not what we read..We are how we read”(3). Wolf expands Carr’s point by stating that thanks to the internet we put immediate and efficient answers above knowing how to interpret the text well. This shows how Carr effectively used pathos with the “Either-Or” strategy by how he divides the options of what will supposedly happen to his audience and giving them an expert in the field to fuel their fear of how we are becoming because the possibility of not knowing how to even process
Carr doesn’t believe that “Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine,” and that the technological changes seen throughout all of history have been seen with a great satisfaction or with massive opposition and this is no different(6). The strategy is picked to make it seem like there will be either a world where technology is used in a passive manner or technology takes control because of the dependence on it. The reader’s mind will process this and then think about the scenarios given rather than think about them for themselves, which shows the strong use of pathos because it is an appeal to his audiences fear to technology controlling us as a society. Carr’s use of the either or strategy was used effectively since he makes the two scenarios blatant to his audience and using other well-known professionals work to further his own. The author that promotes his point most effectively is a fellow colleague; Marryane Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University who bluntly states “We are not what we read..We are how we read”(3). Wolf expands Carr’s point by stating that thanks to the internet we put immediate and efficient answers above knowing how to interpret the text well. This shows how Carr effectively used pathos with the “Either-Or” strategy by how he divides the options of what will supposedly happen to his audience and giving them an expert in the field to fuel their fear of how we are becoming because the possibility of not knowing how to even process