Essay about Effects of Internet Information Overload

In his writing, Carr explains how his mind has become much more erratic since his use of the internet. “I get fidgety, lose the thread, [and] begin looking for something else to do,” Carr says (572). The availability of information that people have these days is astonishing, and their intake of it is even more considerable. In connection to the information people have access to in our day and age, it has promoted a culture of disinterest and boredom. You are able to see this clearly in a study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London. The subjects displayed “a form of skimming activity,” jumping from source to source. They normally would read no more than one or two pages of a book or article before they would go to another site, seldom returning to any source they had already viewed.

The internet that so many of us have come to depend on is a vast trove of information that is readily available to all of us. Having access to all of that information is an amazing thing but we should also consider what we may be loosing because of the way that we consume that information. Is reading these short bites of information one after another causing us to loose the ability to actually focus on one longer piece of text and contemplate its meaning? This is the question that Nicholas Carr looks at in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

I feel as though Nicholar Carr succeeded in demonstrating the importance of how the Internet changes our brain’s ability to absorb information. The opposing views of his claim would be that there is not a change in our thinking or that the Internet is not what is responsible for that change. My position is most closely aligned with Carr’s. I believe that the Internet’s convenience has altered the expectations we have for how easily information should be presented. We prefer information to be short, to-the-point, tidbits that are easy to

To begin, the internet is altering the human ability to concentrate for long periods of time. There are many distractions on the internet. Even if people are looking for something as small as a definition on the internet, all of the hyperlinks and ads can make people stray away from finding it. Many people begin to get fidgety and lose concentration after only a couple of pages. Nicholas Carr struggles with keeping his concentration by stating in his essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid” that “ I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do” (Carr 731). A person could be checking the score of a football game when all of the sudden an email message appears and totally diffuses that persons attention away from the score of the game. Also, the human brain is beginning to adapt to receiving information quickly. Research that took days of searching through multiple books can now be done in only a few

In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr (2008), the author talks about how the internet affects our life in many ways. He states his argument, “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” (4). People associate with the internet everyday as a daily habit, but they do not know that it is slowly changing their life in some ways such as our reading behavior, attention and an actual knowledge people have.

Author Neil Postman’s main argument in his book “Technopoly: A Surrender of Culture to Technology” is not between humanists and scientists but between technology and people. In today’s society technology has become accepted as a friend, a helper, something needed. Postman argues that “the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living Postman XII).” Technology according to Postman, creates a culture with no moral foundation, a culture that undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life interactive. Technology is a friend but, it can also be

In the Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr discusses the changes in a human’s thinking style and concentration ability that have occurred since they start depending on the internet for information. The author begins describing the new struggle that he is facing with reading lengthy texts. He indicates that this change is caused from spending a long time on the internet. Carr noted that this universal medium does not only provide endless benefits for the public, but also shapes the process of their thoughts. The internet is affecting human cognition; therefore, controls their brains, causes lack of capacity to concentrate, and disengages their ability to read, absorb, and interpret articles. The author is not the only

The pull towards technology is as strong as it ever was, but is the pull to have easy entertainment overshadowing the need to be accurately informed? In the beginning of his speech, Postman begins to compare and contrast the views given in both 1984 and Brave New World. One of the more startling points presented said, “In Orwell’s book, … people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.” As a society, we like the easy road. We like to put in the least amount of effort required in most everything that we do, but this can also include the process of

Pop-up ads are constantly on every link, along with flashy signs and music to keep us from concentrating on the task. This ultimately leads to multitasking. We assume that we can handle all the information thrown at us together, but in reality it is too much. An experiment done by Thomas Buser and Noemi Petter involved three groups. The first group consisted of participants who worked on two tasks consecutively for twelve minutes each. The second group had to alter between these two tasks every four minutes for the same amount of time. Subjects in group three were not notified of how many switches were going to occur and for how long. The three group’s total time spent on each task was equal to prevent any lurking variables. The results of this experiment showed work schedules can be an important factor in productivity. The results emphasized that participants who focused on one task at a time, had a higher productivity rate than the subjects that tried to multitask. Machines can run several applications at one time while keeping one hundred percent concentration on each, precisely because it is a machine, people simply cannot. Carr agress that the internet has almost taken control over people. He says, “The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and

Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, has done extensive research on the effects of data overload on people. Carr said, "If you're constantly distracted, constantly interrupted and you don't attend to information closely, you never consolidate that information in your long-term memory and you never create the wealth of internal connections that give richness to your thought". In his book, Carr say’s “while skimming through information is efficient, people are losing the ability to fully concentrate and absorb information”. This causes people to not remember enough information that should be stored in their long-term

The central message of this article is to explain to its audience how the Internet is affecting its users over the past 20 years. This article and the book itself are based on three years research of studies conducted on this subject. Mainly this message is explaining how the access to the constant and unlimited stream of information on Internet is affecting people’s concentration and loss of focus in daily life.

Information overload in my opinion is here to stay, it is always compounding. It just takes adjustment to our technical and social systems. There are times, I recall using oversized status boards to display the status of aircraft. There were creative ideas being accomplished socially and we were able to input additional information and this led to having to build and adapt to the status boards getting larger and larger. Due time would change all of this data being displayed on the status boards and eventually we had to advance to the technical systems of the time. This update to inputting data into a computer presented challenges socially in the organization. There were costs for some of the

One can describe how the excessive usage of the internet has greatly affected the way that humans learn, which

The clock is ticking, the work is piling up, and with only a few hours to go before sunrise you stop and realize that you have just read some fifty pages and absorbed almost nothing. Some would agree when I say that this situation epitomizes one of the common problems of the Net Generation. With the help of the Internet, not only has every aspect of life gotten faster and more efficient, but it has changed the way people process information and perform tasks. In addition, while technology does have its benefits, the extensive use of the internet is affecting the way people think.

The very fundamental purpose of Internet is to provide an open information framework with few access barriers to information. There are several potential risks associated with the implementation of Internet in the organization. So managers should pay attention to it and avoid it.