`` Kitchen Controversial `` By Rebecca Traister And The Great Forgetting By Nicholas Carr

In this quote, W. H. Auden speaks about the not so distant future or possibly even current life. Auden, a renowned poet who was the chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for 19 years. The revolution of people to machines has changed production and assembly lines and work environments as well as cost many jobs. Advancements of technology in this modern era can be very impressive from what we had 10 or 20 years ago. Do machines deteriorate your skill that is needed for us to perform tasks? Are machines truly beneficial or are they causing more harm to our economy and production? To

Nicholas Carr, the author of “All Can be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Heads of Machines”, expresses the major concerns towards technology. In this story many crashes and devastating accidents are presented. These accidents could have easily been avoided through the proper knowledge of the air staff members. As a result of technology, pilots are trained less expensively and therefore are unable to react in urgent situations. For example, they now rely on auto-pilot to do more of the directing than they rely on themselves for. This idea is expressed throughout many other stories, demonstrating the lack of knowledge due to the increasing use of technology. One main point that Carr makes is that individuals are constantly starting

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.

“Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicolas Carr, argues that using the internet to read is less thought inciting then reading books. Carr has focused on the various claims that support the argument above. The writer claims that the Internet causes lack of concentration as it is full of ads, hyperlinks, and other media which is meant to distract us. This he gives the example of someone reading the latest headlines in a newspaper site when suddenly a new e-mail messages announces its arrival with a tone of some sort. He says that the “The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.” The next claim he makes is that the way we read on the Internet is changing how we use our brains to think; therefore making us less contemplative. Carr mentions Maryanne Wolf who works as a developmental psychologist at Tufts University. Wolf believes that when we read online we become “mere decoders of information”. I believe that Carr uses this example to give the illusion that when we read online we don’t truly gain knowledge but instead we just gather more information.

Bruce Friedman, a blogger, has mentioned how the Net had changed his mental habits. Friedman has lost the ability to read and absorb long articles, now he just quickly scans short passages. Anything, even blog posts longer than three paragraphs are too much for him he just skims the articles. A study conducted by University College London suggests that we could be in the middle of a change, the way we are now thinking and reading. This study consisted of two popular research websites, one operated by the British Library and the other by a UK Educational Consortium. The individuals using this website only skimmed, hopping from one source to another, rarely returning to a previous source or reading more than two

The article published by The Atlantic, titled Is Google Making Us Stupid? causes the reader to contemplate the effect that the internet really has on us. Technology is used daily by the grand majority of people, and we jumped into this lifestyle without researching the effects it would have on us. Until recently people have not thought twice about this, but now we mutiple people, including scientists, questioning the effects on the brain. One of the hypothesized problems caused by the internet are the inability to retain information. The reasoning behind this thought is we try to be quick about our reading, we do not like being inefficient, what we do is we skim. The writer found this to be true for himself as well as a couple of his friends

He was even a lit major. He thinks that the way he thinks has changed. Another blogger named Bruce Friedman said that the Internet altered his thinking. He said he has almost lost the ability to read longer articles. Nicholas Carr says that even though we are reading more than we were in the 1970s and 1980s it is a different kind of reading and a different kind of thinking. James Old, a professor of neuroscience said that even in adulthood the brain can still reprogram its self to alter its functions. Nicholas Carr said that the Net is chipping away his concentration. His mind wants to take in information the way the Net distributes it. He said “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet ski.” He is saying that he skims things instead of reading it

In his Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr contends that the overload of information is “chipping away his capacity for concentration and contemplation”(315). He admits with easy accessibility of information online, the process of research has became much simpler(Carr 315). Yet such benefit comes with a cost. Our brains are “rewired” as the cost of such convenience(Carr 316). As the result, “we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s...but it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking”(Carr 317). Carr argues the forming of such habits can prevent us from deep reading and thinking. In fact, he provides may evidences in the

2). Carr explains the issues he is having with deep reading after spending too much time on the Internet, beginning with; how he becomes fidgety and distracted when reading. He looks for other things to do as opposed to reading and now struggles with reading all together; a hobby that used to be so easy for him. Today, the Internet is an essential source of information, as Carr explains in paragraph four. Despite the endless knowledge the Internet has to offer, Carr argues that it is doing humans more harm than good by saying, “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” What Carr is trying to say is that the Internet is leading individuals away from reaching a deep level of reading, thinking, and analyzing. By comparing his concentration to the ocean, Carr shows his audience how the internet has negatively altered his way of reading intellectually. Bruce Friedman, faculty member at the University of Michigan Medical School, describes how the Internet has changed the way he reads into a sort of “staccato,” meaning

Nicholas Carr’s article on The Atlantic asks us to question what effect the Internet has on our brains. At the time this article was written, the Internet was becoming more and more apart of our daily routine as many find themselves using it for work purposes or simply for leisure. Carr, as a seemingly literary type himself, says, “Computers are changing the normal thinking process” causing not only him but also many others to struggle reading. Nicholas Carr wrote this article to bring to attention the webs effect on our mind and how it has turned us into page skimmers and information decoders who can no longer focus on reading a piece in its entirety. In “Is Google Making us Stupid?” published on to The Atlantic’s issue in July/August of 2008, Carr, through emotional, and logical appeals, imagery and structure, successfully crafts his argument on the drifting concentration due to computers and internet use.

Carr states a point that I have previously mentioned: “[a]nd what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” (Carr 1). Not only do I relate to this reaction, but I deem it true for any person attempting to use the Internet for research, writing, or seeking specific information. Given that the preceding few weeks I have been in this online course, and up until this reading, I had not taken notice of how horrible my concentration became while on the Internet. Nicholas Carr lets the reader in on a fact that I was negligent of, explaining, “…the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements” (Carr 1). If this statement does not make one feel “stupid,” let me expand a little further. Did you know Google and “other companies” hire minions to take a look at what pages we spend the most of our time viewing and then use that information to feed us more unsolicited internet propaganda? Essentially internet users have become a group of clicking guinea

In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr discusses the topic of Internet usage and whether or not it is affecting our intelligence. He begins his article by saying that he has begun to feel as though someone is tampering with his memory. Carr states that while he does not believe his memory is decreasing, it is also not improving. He believes that his concentration is not as strong, saying that he can’t stay focused on one story long enough to complete it, and if he does, he cannot focus on the plot enough to soak in the point the author is trying to convey. Carr tells us that he thinks that his diminished concentration is because of skimming articles online instead of reading entire writings for his research. He also

Carr observes this in his own behavior, “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” (Carr 20). As people change the way they learn from reading books to skimming online articles, their attention span for the former significantly shrinks, and they no longer find themselves able to sit through a book or even an essay. Also, similar behavior to what Carr experienced was documented in a British study, “They found that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they already visited,” (Carr 21). The internet promotes skimming opposed to actually reading and digesting articles, and because of this people are less and less interested in deep reads and deep thought. They are beginning to refuse any learning outside of the efficiency of the internet, even when better information may lie in a longer

The internet is our conduit for accessing a wide variety of information. In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr discusses how the use of the internet affects our thought process in being unable to focus on books or longer pieces of writing. The author feels that “someone, or something, has been tinkering with [his] brain” over the past few years (Carr 731). While he was easily able to delve into books and longer articles, Carr noticed a change in his research techniques after starting to use the internet. He found that his “concentration often [started] to drift after two or three pages” and it was a struggle to go back to the text (Carr 732). His assertion is that the neural circuits in his brain have changed as a

In terms of the family, Cohen describes it as an institution in which one is socialized, or taught the rules of society and how to act accordingly, as well as a place for child rearing and intimacy. In a more traditional sense, this would include a husband and wife, as well as any children they may have. Traister doesn’t spend as much time discussing life within the family, but rather examines how women seek to depart from this ideal. In reality, this becomes the crux of Traister’s narrative, originated from the migration of women from the kitchen to the workforce in the 1960’s, an examination of how higher education and career prospects led to eventual individualized postponing of marriage. From both Cohen and Traister’s perspectives, this restructuring, or at least reexamination of the family arena was a major catalyst for the eventual societal decrease in marriage.