Negative Effects Of Information Overload

Birkerts provides three effects that will occur as a result of moving away from the printed word to the electronic media. The first effect is the language erosion. He explains the reader that transition from books will lead to the “complexity and distinctiveness of verbal and written communication, which are deeply bound to transaction of print literacy, will gradually be replaced by a more telegraphic sort of plainspeak” (9). In the future our language will start to become more simple and dumb. Whereas, by reading books and printed materials people are able to dig more depth and understand and imagine the contents. But, soon this will start to disappear as people will no longer be able to understand the complex language of the literature and intelligence level of people will start to decrease. The second effect of electronic media is the flattening of historical perspectives. This means that due to the electronic media the history will start to recede because the “printed page itself is a link” and when this link is broken the past will gradually diminish (10). Birkerts explains the audience that the past is best represented in the books and libraries. Therefore, moving away from the printed word means moving away from the past and its history. The last effect is the waning of the private self. Birkerts worries that in the future people will forget how to live because of the electronic

A huge beneficial effect of the Internet is time-efficiency because it no longer takes days to find research. Fortunately, it only takes a couple of minutes to do a few Google searches. Another benefit to the Internet, in comparison to the last example, is that it is a channel for most of the world’s information. For Carr, as for others, the Internet is becoming a universal medium. Lastly, it is probable that we may be doing more reading today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was a choice of interest. It is assumed that we may do more reading today because not only do we have access to a variety of texts, but also a numerous amount of ways of communicating. For example, social media accounts and text-messaging. A negative effect of the Internet is that it is chipping away capacity for contemplation. The Internet is

The internet has revolutionized the world. The internet users can easily access from any data from around the world. However, the internet was also made the users less critical thinkers since the data obtain can be easily found online instead of reading it from a print book. Two sources in particular, Nicholas Carr, “Shallows” and Michael’s Aggers, interview with Clive Thompson “Smarter than you think” have recently argued how the internet has changed our memory and ways of thinking. The internet is bad for your brain because it limits your knowledge of memorization and XXXXXXX .In the book Shallows by Carr, he states. “The arrival of the limitless and easily searchable data banks of the Internet brought a further shift, not just in the way

The author compares the difference from the past and the present and how the internet has changed not only himself, but others and the way that they are able to understand and focus due to the long-term use of the web. While comparing the past and the present the author gathers information from well know writers that feel the same way about the effects of the web. The author's choice of personal experiences, vivid imagery and analysis backed by research hook the reader and persuades them to believe that today's technology is causing mainly problems.

In Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering” (found in Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, published 2011) he explores the history and current state of remembering and how technology affects it.

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

In the article “Does Tech Make Us Stupid? the author Genevieve Roberts presents different views of the effect of technology on our memory. Roberts obtains these views through the results of various studies performed in universities and by quoting a collection of books she has read. Roberts states that the use of technology has caused our memory to deteriorate therfore promoting a dependency on technology to retrieve information.

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

This essay is informative because it shows how habits, and the mind, are changing because of the internet. People have become dependent on instant information; impatient when needing to research a topic; no longer need to remember information since it can be recalled on the computer; reliant on the

Although progression across the world may have slowed at times, progress has constantly been made in just about every field imaginable. Technology has exploded in recent years, and such developments have meant a lot for the future of communication amongst the human race. Of course, as with nearly every other rapidly expanding medium that leads to drastic changes for the way humans interact, there are analysts following the change. One such analyst is S. Craig Watkins, who wrote an essay titled “Fast Entertainment and Multitasking in an Always-On World” in his book The Young and the Digital (2009). In the essay, which numbers about nine pages, Watkins discusses recent technological advancements and what they mean for society. The article begins

In his 2008 article, “Is Google making us stupid”, Nicholas Carr makes the claim that the use of the internet is having a detrimental effect on people’s cognition. That by having our attentions constantly interrupted our brains are being rewired causing our attention spans to be shortened and reducing our ability to contemplate on what we are reading. He offers his own experiences with reading printed books and articles and the decline of his concentration and contemplation. While Carr makes some interesting claims, he misses the idea that the internet is not changing our brains in a negative way but is allowing us to free our thoughts. This change could result in reducing the need to retain minor or inconsequential data and it

The information that the internet provides is convenient, too convenient in fact. When in the past one would have to memorize the periodic table or the amendments to the United States Constitution, these facts can be easily found online. Socrates proposed that “by substituting outer symbols for inner memories”, humans are prevented “from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness”. Essentially, when a fact is continually referenced from a script, as opposed to recalled from memory, the synapses that relate memory begin to disappear. Similarly, with the advances of technology in the current age, it has become so easy for humans to quickly search for an answer. Attention is not given as to how the answer was derived, it is simply used. The concise nature of the internet propagates this problem. When an internet search is performed, more often than not, an informational box will appear with a summary of the search query. This exemplifies the fact that readers no longer have to search for a main idea. Similarly, some famous periodicals such as the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times have shifted to a format which emphasizes summaries. The New York Times decided to include a three-page section of each “edition to paragraph-long article abstracts and other brief items” (Carr, 95). The purpose of this is to allow

For some, it does not seem important to make efforts to retain data, seeing that they possess an " electronic memory " capable of offering them any necessary information. Why strain our brain or memory when there is an also big and rich amount of information at our fingertips from any site? Many people think that to try to memorize an information which we can obtain in one, two clicks, is a waste of time. Hard drives have replaced the individual memory. Nowadays, for example, if we need to take knowledge of the works of a writer, we just have to write his name on the web, and we can even get explicit summaries about his works instead of reading the book itself and find our own explanations as formerly. “A study suggests that human memory is reorganizing where it goes for information, adapting to new technologies rather than relying purely on rote memory. We're outsourcing "search" from our brains to our computers…a new study confirms it: Google is altering your brain. More precisely, our growing dependence on the Internet has changed how -- and what -- our brains choose to remember. When we know where to find information, we're less likely to remember it” (Krieger, McClatchy); today’s society, we are called to deal with a lot of data on a daily basis, so some people prefer to rely on the internet, which is rich in ideas and quick to provide information, explanations, rather than do a job that could take a long time to perform; “In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates… feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” (Carr 59); If our brain become as "empty box", we cannot have our own point of view, considering that what we are supposed to have for knowledge is a part of our personality; make our own study is essential to the formation of our

Technology has drastically changed everyday life. Author Daniel M. Wegner and Adrian F. Ward discuss the effects of technology on memory in their article “How Google Is Changing Your Brain.” Wegner and Ward explore the tendency to distribute the gathering of information among colleagues and close friends. They classify this ability as the “transactive memory system.” However, Wegner and Ward argue that with the invention of the Internet, many are essentially replacing these human memory partners with technology. This, in turn, has a significant effect on the way one processes and retrieves information. Through Wegner and Ward’s use of logos, ethos, and pathos, they effectively validate their argument.