Reading Response #2

Reading Response # 2

Is Google Making Us Stupid

By Elena Golovin

In Carr's Essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Nicholas Carr claims that the use of the Internet has reprogrammed our memory circuits from reading in the traditional sense to skimming the text. Carr emphasizes that the Net is a universal media that has reduced our concentration capacity and the ability to absorb information from long pieces of texts, has vanished. He believes that the Net not only provides us with information and ideas but also changes the way we process those ideas. The use of our new preferred media has created a new style of reading. Instead of taking our time to reading an article we quickly browse through it.

Nicholas Carr quotes "The more they use the web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on longish pieces of writing." Carr elaborates that because we spend so much time and energy on the Internet we no longer have the capability to focus on writing because the way we think has changed. This claim is important because almost everyone uses or has used the net so almost everyone can relate to it. From my recent experiences I have realized that I always lose my train of thought or focus when I'm reading anything from an article, magazines, and especially long pieces of text. My mind simply drifts to another place and once I regain my focus I realize I have to start all over again and re-read everything. I like this quote because I now know that I am not the only one who loses their focus when reading.

"The more pieces of information we can access and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers." Is another quote from Carr. He uses this quote to contradict that the faster we access and extract information is actually not making use better thinkers but over all has caused us to have less focus and concentration when reading.

Nicholas Carr also uses a variety of examples and quotes from other people to help support his claim. Marshall Mcluhan quotes "My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it; in a swift moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski. Marshall explains that the time consumed on the Net has changed the way he processes and reads. He no longer takes time to analyze his reading he now dashes through it like some one on a race.

When I read on-line I have noticed that if the article seems long I start to jump from sentence to sentence until I find he exact information I am looking for. I have also noticed when I find information on-line I forget it in the next couple of days because I know if I need that same piece of information I can just look it up on the Net because the information is so easily accessible. I can now see that with all the time I spent on the computer they way I read has definitely changed. I now know that technology has changed the style of reading.