Reading Response #2 Jared Eckert

            I think it is safe to say the internet has given us the ability to obtain information at a blistering pace. We can find bits and pieces of information instantly instead of hours or days. But do we connect with these pieces of information we so easily receive?  Nicholas Carr has his doubts.

            Carr advocates that the internet has “rewired” how our brain interprets data in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid?  Since the birth of the internet, it’s popularity and use has exploded in numbers no one cold have predicted. Just about everything is done through the web these days. T.v., radio, books, newspapers, music, anything and everything has found its way to the world wide web. So much at our finger tips, at such a fast rate. Have our brains begun thinking in such a way? I’m not talking about accessing information in our brain instantaneously. I’m talking about our ability to concentrate and connect deeply with a single piece of writing or information.

            In high school, during research projects I was told by my instructors to “skim” the websites and articles for the information necessary for my subject. Reading anything fully has become “inefficient” and a waste of time. Now, now ,now is what the world seems to be all about these days and I’ve felt it. Through this idea that merely scanning text to get the general idea of things has taken its toll on my minds patience. As we speak I am having a difficult time sitting down and composing sentences and ideas without my mind wondering or veering off into the all too familiar “I should check facebook.”  As fast as the information pops up on my screen, equally and oppositely has my attention left.

            Ncholas purposes the idea that maybe our brains and our way of think have become obsolete. That machines are surpassing the human psyche. Robots are on the verge of over throwing the human race, the human mind. We’ve all seen movies with a plot such as this such as I Robot. Computers with super possessors and terabytes of memory storage are increasingly more abundant. Capable of crunching and storing more information that our brains. Clearly computers and machines are making our minds weaker, right? Plato, the great greek philosopher believed that writing would be the absolute down fall of the human mind. Back then it was normal for people to have entire epics memorized. Writing to him meant a lack of understanding, and lost of capability to learn and absorb. It is very apparent now that writing has expanded our information to every corner of  the planet and has done nothing more than help our brains learn and absorb information.

            In conclusion, Though it may be true that computers and the internet are altering the way our brains take in data, we don’t know if there is some  benefit from it yet. Just as Plato didn’t see how writing would change the way people a acquire and master information.