Reading Response #2

Nicholas Carr shares his thoughts on the Internet and computers and how it has affected our thinking process in the Article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. He portrays that this type of technology has altered the way our mind works, and that it has changed how we conceive and comprehend information. We have been given a more convenient way of reading and collecting information; isn’t that what most of us look for? Whatever the easiest way to get what we need is. We already get hooked online, by pages like Facebook and email, so why not just do some reading on the computer rather than get offline and pick up a book? The article mentions that reading online has also altered the amount of reading we can absorb. On the Internet you can find summary’s and shorts of what you need to make it easy. Although there isn’t endless information to support the fact that our minds are beginning to process information differently, there are signs showing that this could be the start of a change. ““We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.””. The metamorphose of our brains that we are seeing is not necessarily a change that’s making us stupid but rather alters that are caused by us abusing what we have and in result we are doing things differently that maybe we can’t benefit from as greatly. Technology is one of the subjects that will never be put to rest, partly because it is always growing. It’s very important and has done much for us, but there is always going to be the side of what bad it has/can do. Too much of anything can result negatively, but I believe we have the power to watch out for that. Personally I have never been too big of a reader, and I hadn’t ever made the connection that I could be engaging differently caused by the different reading. I do see how that could be true. Our brains have the ability to reprogram itself, says James Olds, a neuroscience professor; if this is true, then I can understand how a change like this could change the way to obtain and collect information. I want to believe that we aren’t getting stupid from our technology; something that is supposed to help us and can improve so much. Maybe we just rely on it; a change that could be inevitable, it would have happened anyway. The Internet causes us to move to fast, a problem our society already has. We have become so busy to keep up with what our world has made important; that we lose what we could gain when we slow down. We get online and read quickly for the information we need so we lose some of those original thoughts we have because we don’t make the time to let ourselves have that.