reading response 2

Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google making us Stupid?” insists that the internet may be persuading our brains to think differently and changing the way that we think; we are using the computer to think for us. “Once I was a scuba diver in a school of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.” I appreciate the way he can come to terms with the way he has changed. I tend to “take the easy way out” by looking for a “summarized” version of something or flipping through different Google links for the subject that I searched, that is how I’ve been since I started having to do research for classes and papers. I cannot stay focused long enough to comprehend what it is that I am reading so I get frustrated and try re-reading and reading the same sentence over and over and pretty so I just get to the point where I want to give up. Carr writes about a study done, and the findings of the study. The study was to show what amount of people actually read through articles and what percent “skim.” I found myself thinking that I am one of those people who “skim” the reading, as I am sure that many of my peers do. It is definitely the easier way to go. A claim that I found surprising and frightening and makes me want to tell my friends and family to stop “web surfing” is “The faster we surf across the web-the more links we click and pages we view-the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and feed us advertisements.” There are flashy advertisements pulling us from site to site, and when you go on Google and all the things you search, they are on your computer, even after you delete them, they follow you and the advertisements give our computers viruses and lead us into things that are going to trick us into typing in our information and giving out the most personal information and we become a part of a scam and now anyone and everyone has access to the information. “Over the past years I have had an uncomfortable sense that someone or something has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory, my mind isn’t going-so far as I can tell- but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.” To me Carr is saying that he feels like someone and/or something is overpowering the way that he uses and thinks about the computer. The internet is not letting him think for himself and changing the way that he thinks in general. I feel that this claim is very important because when you get so used to something and it begins to “take you over” to where you cannot even think for yourself. Then there is something that is going on and it needs to be fixed. It is not healthy to get into such a routine that you aren’t “thinking the way that you used to think."