Respond the essay with 6 Qs

Zoya Allred

DeVito

English 102 1100

2/24/2017

The Internet and Our Minds

The development of the internet has changed the way we think and process information. The way our minds developed is affected by how we spend our time. Reading was a simple task that has become a chore because our minds begin to drift. In the article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nicholas Carr describes, not being able to concentrate on reading, but instead skimms to find the information he needs. The internet allows you to jump from one thing to another to keep your mind entertained. In the article, The Culture of the Copy by James Panero, he describes how the internet has developed and changed for us.

Over the past couple years, we have lost touch with ourselves. “My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.” said Carr. He notices the change the most when he is reading because, what used to be a simple task now takes effort. Immersing himself into a book has become a chore and he begins to look for something else to do to keep his mind busy.

WIth the development of the internet and all the things that it allows us to do, we spend a lot of time exploring it. “For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.” said Carr. He no longer needs to spend days in the library collecting data because the internet allows him to find all the information he needs in minutes.

The internet is more than just for work, it if for leisure time as well. “Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’ reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.” said Carr. He related the internet to being a “universal medium” where everyone gets their information from. The first thing most people do in the morning is check their phone, to see what they have missed. The internet is able to supply stuff for thought as well as shape the thought process. At the same time, the internet is taking away mental capacity for concentration and contemplation. Since most information is found online, the whole picture is not always provided. This could help shape the thought of an incomplete picture and misinformed information can be spread. At the same time, it allows you to look for more than one source of information to get an even broader picture. We have shorter attention spans because we are used to getting the information we need in seconds, that we don’t process the information completely. “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.” said Carr. He describes another blog he follows, Scott Karp, that mentioned having the same issues concentrating. Karp was a Literature major in college, who admitted that he stopped reading books all together, instead doing all his reading online. Karp feels that is has not only changed the way he reads but the way he thinks as well. We expect to receive constant information in seconds. Instead of slowly reading and processing the information, we quickly scan it, to pull out the information we need.

Carr describes a study of online research habits done by the University College London. He wanted to know if the internet affects cognition. “They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.” said Carr. While examining students for five years, they found that often, they would read a couple pages on one site, then move on to the next one without finishing it. Some saved the articles but showed no evidence of going back to check it out later. This shows that there is a new way of reading starting to develop. Skimming or “power browsing” contents of a page instead of reading it fully.

Online power browsing is not the only new way of reading that is being developed. “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. “ said Carr. Although we may be reading more now, we aren't reading to better ourselves anymore. Wanting an answer immediately doesn't allow you to think deeply anymore. It is weakening our brain's capacity develop. “Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings.” said Carr. Unlike speech, we have to teach ourselves how to read and write. We adapt to using other technologies to learn and practice the skill. This also helps us develop our memory, vision, and speech.

We are able to reprogram our brains on the fly, meaning that we can train our brains to do one thing and then instantly do another. Carr compares this to training your brain to follow time. By inventing time, man was able to create “the scientific mind and the scientific man”. Instead of using our brains to help us do what we need to we are relying on technology to do it for us. “It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.” said Carr. With all the distractions that we surround ourselves with, we are losing our mental capacity. We need to constantly be doing something to keep our minds entertained.

“Technological revolutions are far less obvious than political revolutions to the generations that live through them.” said Panero. Technology is something that we are interested in developing now, that they weren't as concerned with in the past. As we develop new tools and new ways of doing things, it doesn't get realized until it is happening. Once it has started making changes for the better, then we will see that it is a good thing, and continue to use it. “We rarely appreciate the changes they bring until they are brought.” Not everyone is welcoming to new ideas and new inventions, but would rather stay with what they know how to use. It takes time for a majority of people to get comfortable using a new device, for it to become the new way of doing things.

New technology creates more jobs, because, they require new roles instead of replacing the old ones. Panero includes, “It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?” describing it as the classic response to the invention of the telephone. An idea is only an idea until it is developed and used. They didn’t know that there could be an easier, faster way of communicating until the invention of the telephone was thought of. After it was developed, it still took time for it to be used by the majority of the population. Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes invention of the telephone shows that, “Life-altering technologies often start as minor curiosities and evolve into major necessities with little reflection on how they reform our perceptions or even how they came to be.” When the development of the telephone was made, they didn’t know that is was going to be a necessity to live in the future.

In conclusion, the internet allows you to do multiple things at once. It has developed in such a way that we have become reliant on it to keep us busy. No longer are we memorizing numbers, directions, and thoughts. We have a device that can do it all for us. A simple task like reading has become so boring that not many people do it anymore for fun. Instead you can go on the internet and skip through articles until you find one that interests you. When that gets old, you can just move on to the next thing. It takes time for people to adapt to the new ideas and continue to develop and use them. These new technologies are creating more jobs. People who are trained to fix and work on them. We need to continue to grow with technology and allow the changes being made to our brain to be for the better.

Works Cited:

Goshgarian, Gary, and Kathleen Krueger. Dialogues: An Argument Rhetoric and Reader. Boston: Pearson, 2015. Print. Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nicholas Carr

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Panero, James. "The Culture of the Copy." Current Issue. N.p., n.d. Web. Jan. 2013

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-culture-of-the-copy-7517