Reading response 2

In Nicholas Carr’s article Is Google Making Us Stupid, he assumes that technology and specifically the internet is changing the way that humans are thinking and reading. One of Carr’s main claims is that, since the invention of the internet we have started losing our ability to read and focus on large works because of so much of what we are reading on the internet are usually short snippets of information. He goes on to say that, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” Later he tells how he was “once a scuba diver in the sea of words” but now he “zips along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.” One of the studies cited by Carr was done at the University College London focused on online research habits. What they found supports Carr’s claim. They found that while researching online people tended to skim, “hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source already visited.” He provides more evidence to support his claim by referencing Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University, who thinks that the style of reading we get from the net could be weakening our capacity for deep reading and interpreting text.

One of Carr’s subsequent claims is that, “Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological process, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine.” This basically means that whenever there is some large technological breakthrough there are always going to be people that think it is great and people that think it will doom us for various reasons. People can’t just look at the short term picture they need to look at the whole thing to see the benefits.

I find myself agreeing with Carr’s claim that the internet is changing the way we read and think but I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. I like many people tend to skim articles and jump around to different websites on the internet but I also love reading good long thought provoking article or a long novel. When reading different types of material I look over it and try and determine what type of reading style would suit it best. If it is long and has large paragraphs I will read it thoroughly but if it has short paragraphs or lots of bullet points I tend to skim it because it is faster and easier to pick out the main points and ideas. What people need to do is strike a balance of what they read (short snippets, long articles, novellas, and insanely large novels). We need to let the internet change the way we think so we can operate in the modern world but also try to keep our deep reading abilities and utilize both of them when you need to. This change is inevitable so we must embrace it and adapt to it to succeed in the world today.