Is the Internet Taking over Teenagers?

Carr identifies how reading a book is different from reading online because when you read online, you don’t think deeply about what it is you’re reading, and you don’t have to concentrate nearly as much. Carr also mentions that the Internet is something people find themselves going to more often than books because it is more time efficient.

With the rise of technology and the staggering availability of information, the digital age has come about in full force, and will only grow from here. Any individual with an internet connection has a vast amount of knowledge at his fingertips. As long as one is online, he is mere clicks away from Wikipedia or Google, which allows him to find what he needs to know. Despite this, Nicholas Carr questions whether Google has a positive impact on the way people take in information. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr explores the internet’s impact on the way people read. He argues that the availability of so much information has diminished the ability to concentrate on reading, referencing stories of literary types who no longer

“The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing” (Carr 773). Carr’s point is because people are using the web, it is making it harder for them to concentrate and process information. Carr and Turkle both suggest in their articles that people now have lost the ability to be able to concentrate and to be

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.

Although its intention was to nourish our minds with an instant unlimited source of valuable information, the internet has caused some people to lose their appreciation for long texts and their ability to concentrate. Within the essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, the author feels that someone has been tinkering with his brain and that he can no longer enjoy reading a book of any length because he cannot sustain concentration on the book (Carr 1). This is a result of the fact that when people use the internet to find information, they habituate themselves to skim along the lines to quickly allocate their answers and once they have gotten what they needed, they close the browser without any further analysis of the information.

Communication with our society and the aptitude for reading has been transformed by the Internet as we, no matter who we are or what we use, adapt to the mechanism of technology and become a less intelligent, shallow community. Due to the many hours we spend on our electronic devices and the fast-paced reading we’ve adjusted to, our brains have become psychologically less perceptive of how the Internet is affecting our everyday lives. We need to make note of our daily habits and how much time we spend online, for the Internet will continue to affect generation after

According to Nicholas Carr, the internet has had an effect on how we read, think and live. He provides examples of this throughout his essay. In one of his statements he says “the net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information [we receive]” (732) He gathers this information from other colleagues and friends he knows. People can access the internet and in a few clicks to have all the information they need and more. We are no longer limited by local sources to gather our data. At the speed of light, the voices of millions can be heard by all. It is the quick access and our human desire for knowledge that feeds the need for the internet. It has damaged our level of patience and causing our minds to wander. “And what

Nicholas Carr is well known American writer who has written article and books based on business, technology and culture. In 2011, he was the finalist for Pulitzer Prize in General Notification for his book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains.In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he wrote for The Atlantic on Jul 1, 2008. It's very plausible, complicated and persuasive article. The article makes many believable connections to every day's life, compelling people by using metaphors, staying true to the point and using different rhetorical approaches.

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, questions the impact the technology has upon our lives. He argues that the internet prevents our ability to engage in deep reading and thus restricts our ability to think critically. He says this is due to the idea of neuroplasticity, which is where our brains change in order to adapt to the different stimuli it encounters. When books were first introduced, our brain had to rewire itself in order to achieve the ability to focus for long periods of time on text and to think deeply about it. This resulted in a literate deep thinker. However, the internet has forced our brain to rewire itself again. Carr says that “there is evidence that the cells of our brains literally develop and grow bigger with use, and atrophy or waste away with disuse” (22). Our brain has many structures that perform specific functions and the structures associated with deep thinking can decrease and eventually will serve no function if we don’t use it. We are much better thsn our ancestors. According to Carr, “the oral world of our distant ancestors may well have had emotional and intuitive depths we can no longer appreciate” (56). In other words, Carr believes that people in the past engaged in focused, immersed thinking. I believe that Nicholas Carr is right when he says that the internet is changing the way we think, however I don’t believe that we need to turn off the internet in order to reduce the chances of losing

He gathered research from several credited writers, studies, and universities who have done research about the effects of reading on the web. Carr uses his own personal experience, ideas we can relate to, and analysis backed by research to connect to the audience and persuade them that the internet is causing reading focus and comprehension problems in our current society.

Carr’s premise is that the Web is interfering with our ability to focus on lengthy material. On the contrary, the internet is actually aiding our ability to focus on reading. This holds true for younger children, who are known as the digital natives in our generation. In a research conducted by The National Center for Education shows that “by altering the mode of reading material from traditional paper-based reading to online reading,” the interest of elementary school children increased (Wright 367). Because children of the 21st century are surrounded by technology, they are more likely to gear towards digital media for their mode of learning. Contrary to Carr’s view that the internet “is chipping away [the] capacity for concentration and contemplation,” these children are more likely to read and focus as a result of

Nicholas Carr published The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains in 2011 as a result of his own personal experiences and observations of his own behavior. The book was published by W.W. Norton & Company with ISBN 978-0-393-33975-8. Carr began working on the book after he noticed that since the birth of the internet, he did not think in the same ways that he used to think; he was easily distracted and had trouble concentrating on tasks requiring a lot of thought (2011). This effect, he noticed, was not unique to him. Many of his colleagues reported that they too had lost a lot of interest in reading books, had trouble concentrating and were easily distracted (Carr, 2011). What if, Carr wondered, everyone doesn’t just prefer to do their reading on the internet for its inherent convenience and speed but rather, what if the internet was actually changing the way we all think?

In Carrs article he discusses the way that the Internet gives us a false sense of knowledge. When we want to know about something we Google it. We find the article title that is closest to what we are searching for and we click it. In our everlasting quest to be know-it-alls we skim and skim or look for bold words and sentences until we feel that the information we have now obtained is suffice and we are considered knowledgeable about the topic. Although we feel this way, this “knowledge” is usually based off of two or three sentences that are compact and straight to the point.

The way of learning and reading has changed dramatically over many generations because of new technological advances. Learning is the knowledge acquired through experience, study, or being taught. In Birkerts essay, he explains that learning and how we gather information has changed over time. He says newspapers, magazines, brochures, advertisements, and labels are things that are around individuals every day. These are things that individuals will read to gain knowledge of certain things that are going on. For example, individuals will read labels on food items to see what the food is made out of because some individuals are allergic to certain ingredients and need to know this information. Time has changed the way individuals learn. Learning at one time was all from books and individuals taking notes on those books. Years ago, books were rare and that is what individuals used to learn and when they had a book they had to take out all they could from that book. Learning has gone from just books to many different ways of receiving information. Today’s big new way of learning is from the internet. Individuals have gone from staring at a book for hours to typing a question they have into the internet and getting results back from many sources. Birkerts describes this in his essay, “As we now find ourselves at a cultural watershed-as the fundamental process of transmitting information is shifting from mechanical to circuit-driven, from page to screen-it may be time to ask how

Nowadays, there are thousands of books available free on the Internet, and people find them easy to read the book online instead of getting the hard copy of the book. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr explains that the online readings make it becomes difficult for us to pay full attention to the reading “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing”(7). For example, when I have to read the articles from the Internet for my research papers or class assignments, I always have hard time focus on the reading because I easily get distracted by the ads shown on the pages. I start paying attention to the ads instead of understanding and absorb the information. Carr also states that “For some people, the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even little silly- like sewing your own shirts or butchering your own meat”(8). In these days, people find it boring to read books, especially young adults, they think it is a waste of time to read books when they can get the short versions of reading from the Internet instead of reading a page to