Nicholas Carr's Summary: What Is The Internet Doing To Our Brain

Carr has a more negative opinion about new technology than Cascio. Carr believes the internet and previous technological advancements have caused many changes in society, including reducing people’s ability to focus. Carr says, “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” This is just one of the many times that he blames the internet for the changes that have occurred in the past decade.

The Internet is something that some consider their lifesavers, while others believe that it takes their life away. The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr is a novel that explores the different areas of how new technologies affect humans in different ways, regarding multi-tasking and distractions, to how new technologies make us lose a little part of ourselves. Throughout the book Carr puts forward very strong arguments, but then loses creditability with his use of fallacies in argument.

The Internet, a word that is vaguely observed by the many people of this world, is an idea that plays with people’s minds and manipulates individuals by slowly taking over the way they conduct themselves. A person’s mind and the way they control their daily lives changes as the Net dominates the world of technology. In the novel The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, the Net is expressed through the psychological and mental health of people’s habits. Over time, society has become accustomed to the ways of self-connection and a loss of interpersonal communication, using the Internet as their shield from the communal society. No matter the type of person an individual identifies as or what electronic device

With technology on the rise, I see more and more of the human population with their heads buried in their phones. A few of the reasons why they allow the weight of their head to stoop down low is Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Gmail, Google, and Snapchat just to name a few. As my girlfriend would say, who does Kahala Mall’s marketing, “everything is heading in the direction of social media. If you are not with social media you are not with it.” Keep in mind, as she is stating this, I am barking at the fact that she is constantly on her phone. In Nicholas Carr’s essay Is Google Making Us stupid: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains he argues that the internet, technology, and the forces of Google, is changing the way we think. Not only does

In Carr’s description of the Internet, he explains why it is affecting humans. He leaves the technology as a virus that absorbs our commands, injects information into us, and then scatters and spreads our concentration. However, before labeling the Internet as a human made pest that has gone wild, Carr makes one last appeal to ethos by stating possible benefits of this rapidly capable means of statement as well as his own faults of being a worrywart.

In the article, Carr discusses the ways in which the internet has changed thinking. He begins with his personal experience he has noticed. His friends and he noticed that they had shorter attention spans and it was harder to read lengthy novels. Carr then elaborates on how the internet is a universal medium and how it has changed how the brain has changed how it processes thoughts. Carr brought in Bruce Friedman, along with other experts. Friedman agreed with Carr and his friends about

Google is one of the largest thriving companies in the U.S. and it is extremely rare to find anyone that doesn’t know or use Google. With this generation being so tech-savvy, do you ever think to yourself, “Is all this Internet and technology making me stupid?” In the magazine article written by Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, he claims that the Internet is slowly dismantling our capacity for concentration and cognitive abilities overall. Carr is a technology and culture writer who was a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New Yorks Times bestseller. He has written for companies such as The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, therefore proves he is a genuine, credible writer. With multiple examples related to history, decades back, it seems that Carr’s is reaching out and trying to relate to a western, older, more intellectual audience that lived before the Internet era. In my analysis of Carr’s text, I will examine his use of strategies with appeal to authority, identification, and hyperlinks.

Nicholas Carr is a writer on mainly technology and cultural subjects. At the beginning of his Article, he uses an anecdote from the movie Space Odyssey, where a super computer with a artificial brain is talking to Dave Bowman about losing its brain power, and pleading with him to please stop, just as Dave is trying to pull the memory circuits out to turn it off. Due to the fact that the computer leads him in to the middle of nowhere in space, Dave no longer trusts the computer. So he decides to pull the plug on it. Nicholas Carr uses examples of his own life and others to come to a conclusion about internet use and its effects on the human brain. By using statistics and scientific studies, he connects the dots on how and why he may be experiencing his own mind changing while using the internet, such as memory, concentration, and reading.

In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote a very profound article explaining how the internet that everyone has believed to be a useful tool in society and something to help us learn and grow, was actually making us less intelligent. On the first page of the article he starts to explain his own personal tribulations that the internet has caused him, like how his attention span was lessened by the immediate access of the internet. The reason his attention span was dwindling was because of the readily quick information on the internet that is easily accessible by the click of a button. Reading from the internet has caused him to scan things to get the gist of what the article is actually saying that he is reading. He talked to many others and he realized

Carr is correct that the internet has caused a shift in our cultural approach towards accessing information. But we don’t have to choose between the benefits of the internet, which are innumerable, or our former attitude towards reading, learning, social interactions, and other such integral parts of society. The boundaries between ourselves and our tools have worn thin and inadequate, like a well-loved coat that isn’t warm enough on a winter day anymore.

Nicholas Carr set out to examine the effect the internet had on the way individuals process information and concluded that everyone is essentially affected by technology in some way or another. With this hypothesis came his self-examination as well as input from Carr’s colleagues along with experiments providing proof of the “change” in a person’s mindset. Carr initially begins the article using an example of himself. Since using the internet so often for immediate access to information he finds his “mind isn’t going but it’s changing”. He explains that the web was welcomed by him as a writer, as it cut down on research time, but it quickly escalated into being used even when not working through “reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines

In the article, Carr expresses his concerns about the Internet, but he is not completely negative about it or against it; he writes ahead that the Internet has been a godsend to him as a writer (Carr, 589). What he tries to do is to remind us that there are another possible perspective and guideline when we judge and criticize the Internet. After describing all his concerns about the Internet and human intelligence, Carr writes that maybe he is just a worrywart and there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine and refers to the example of Socrates and Squarciafico (Carr, 595). He shows his acknowledgment of the opportunities the Net brings us and his understanding of the reasonability of possible disagreement with him. “You should be skeptical of my skepticism,” he writes (Carr, 596). He expects us to be skeptical of his argument, because he wants us to think more about both pros and cons of the Net. He does not try to deny the Internet or convince us not to use it. Instead, he puts forward the other side of the case to let us have forethought from a different perspective and to be more critical when judging the Internet. When we agree on the bright side of the Internet, how it enables to

To support his argument that the internet is making us stupid, Carr includes studies done on groups of people who use technology. One of the studies that Carr talks about is how a

Jeffrey Hill, a sociologist at Brigham Young University. “It enables just that kind of compulsive behavior.”There's now a serious debate going on within therapeutic circles about whether people can become addicted to the Internet in the way that they might become addicted to chemical substances. And there's a broader debate taking place about whether the Internet is changing the way people think.Much of that debate has been triggered by journalist Nicholas Carr, author of the controversial 2008 Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He has since expanded his ideas into a book called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.Carr says the Internet is an unmatched tool for communications and information but argues that it can have bad effects on our brains. The Internet, he says, speaks to the parts of our brain that are attracted to movement, visual imagery and novelty — primitive parts of the brain that do not lend themselves to deep thought and contemplation.“There's a whole realm of thought that I think is very important to the richness of our personal intellectual lives, and also very important to the building of culture, that requires an attentive mind,” Carr said. “We don't want to sit alone in a dark room thinking about one thing all day long, but neither do we want to be processing a constant influx of texts and

Nicholas Carr believes that people in the modern society are becoming superficial and scattered in their thinking. He represents the nervousness that the public has about technology, and similar to other critics, Carr perceives change as a loss rather than a gain. However, many people would agree that his views are devoid of the humanizing impact of the web and that they are superficial.