Reading Responce #2

Charity Jewell

In the article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid," by Nicholas Carr, he discusses how the Internet is changing our ways of reading and thinking altogether. He basically says that our minds are being rewired and we are becoming technology. In other words, he's states Daniel Bell, "we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies." Carr wants people to realize that the technology we use on a daily basis is slowing our brain’s information-process. Nicholas explains how he himself, his friends and acquaintances feel that "the more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing." This shows that it's become more of a problem than a helpful source because people are struggling to stay focused. Thus, people search the Internet quickly, scanning over things to be done within minutes so they don't have that focus struggle. Carr stated Marshall McLuhan, who said that, " And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation." I agree with this statement because the concentration on reading is lessening the more we read and it makes the scanning over stuff quickly a simple task but the comprehension of what is read can be misinterpreted. There is no aspect anymore to comprehend what you read.
We read more today than previous generations but, as Maryanne Wolf explains, "the style of reading by the Net...may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology made long and complex works of brose commonplace." We are becoming disengaged. For example, our use of clocks is almost required because we need it "to decide when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, and that we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock." Carr uses Joseph Wsizenbuam's statement that this is our reality. James Olds states “The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions,” and because of this our brains are “very plastic” (as Olds says) so our way of thinking and reading is altered as we keep web surfing. In a way our brains are like a digital computer nowadays, can be programmed to perform the function of any other information-receiving device according to Alan Turing.
The Internet can be, in my opinion, compared to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s algorithm. That is breaking down how each worker should work in a factory. This was a time-and-motion study that Taylor used to organize the workers jobs to configure a method for each position. This was the start to the Industrial Revolution. I think that our use of the Internet is far over raided. We get all stressed out and fidgety when we read books or really anything not on the web. I think we should break this habit. I can tell that the use of the web is changing our perspectives on things because we just want to get things done with as soon as we can to go onto the next thing. Yes the internet is useful but if its going to change our point of view so much, I don’t think its worth using for every resource needed. Its good to pick up a book every now and then and be focused completely.