Smartphone Technology Has Become More Advanced And Technology

Do you think that you could go a whole day with your phone in your back pocket without touching it? The author of ‘How smartphones hijack our minds” doesn’t think so. Nicholas Carr uses rhetorical devices such as cited authorities, examples, and uses statistical facts and figures to convey his view that smartphones hijacked our minds. These rhetorical devices are used to reshape your thinking about how much your phones take over your minds and how much they truly affect you without you even knowing. He shares many studies and experiments of students that have taken tests with different controlled variables to see if his statement is factual and that there is evidence that backs it up.

It is a well-known fact that the Internet has become a central part of society, and it has completely changed every aspect of life for the human race, whether it is for better or worse. Nicholas Carr explains his thoughts on how the Internet has changed how people think in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He believes that the human race is losing its ability to think deeply and is creating a distraction culture, and that companies like Google are working to increase this way of thinking. However, the issue of how the human brain is changing with the Internet is very complex, and the answer to this question goes beyond a simple yes or no.

Today, phones play a major role in individuals. In “How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds,” Nicholas Carr uses straightforward diction, studies, and figurative language such as, personification to reveal that individuals are powerless without their phones. Throughout the reading he explained how the brain grows dependent on phone technology, the intellect weakens.

Is your smartphone like your closest companion and friend ; I can say mine’s is! Smartphones are new and addictive in the world. According to the article “How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds” by Nicholas Carr cellular devices have become addictive and seized our brain functionality. In “How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds” by Nicholas Carr, the author uses rhetorical devices such as strong diction, supporting data, and cites studies to strengthen his opinion of the captivity that smartphones possess over our brains.

Even though smart phones are supposed to make working easier, studies have shown that they actually hurt our performance. In 2015, a Journal of Experimental Psychology study had 166 people to test. The experiment was to have the participants work on a challenging task while their phones start beeping and buzzing. The results showed that the worker became messier and had their attention elsewhere, whether or not they checked their phone. Dr. Adrian Ward is a psychologist and marketing professor at the University of Texas at Austin, he has been working with the effects of smart phones on our thoughts and decision making. Dr. Ward believes that we have grown so attached to our phones that they reduce our intelligence with their presence. To test this theory, Dr. Ward and three colleagues began a clever experiment to test his idea. They decided to enlist 520 undergraduate students at UCSD and make them perform two standard tests of intellectual acuity. The first test evaluated “available cognitive capacity”, it’s a test to measure how fully a person’s mind can focus on a single task. The second test gauged “fluid intelligence”, a person’s ability to understand and answer an unfamiliar problem. The only difference was the location of the student’s smart phone. Some students had their phone on the desk, while others had it in their bag or pocket. Others were even asked to leave their phone in a different room. The results of this test showed that “As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased” (pg.3).

With new technological advancements occurring more rapidly each year, it is no surprise that there is an extensive conversation about how these new progressions impact the brain’s development and cognition. One trend is evident: there is a universal acknowledgment that technology is indeed changing the way we think. Among the members contributing to this conversation, two strikingly different outlooks on how these changes will affect the future exist. Either we should be terrified, or worrying is premature. Articles written by experts specializing in psychology and the brain, such as Pinker’s “Mind Over Mass Media,” as well as "How Has the Internet Reshaped Human Cognition?" by Kee and Loh, as well as and finally “Children, Wired- for

“We are always in a perpetual state of being created and creating ourselves (Siegel, 221)”. The brain is a product of its ever-changing environment. As certain linkages between its regions are used more or less frequently, their relative strength fluctuates. Many times, cultural shifts, such as the current transition from a print culture to a digital culture, cause the largest effect on the connections within the brain. Because of the overabundance and simplicity of information on the internet, the brain is becoming more impatient and losing its ability to focus and interact at a deep level. As a result, humans must rely increasingly on the internet.

Media and technology are permeating and changing every part of our lives, but are there consequences to these changes? Nicholas Carr questions if the Internet is helping people as much as it is believed to in his essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” With an increased reliance on the Internet, Carr has found patterns of shortened attention in himself and among others. Carr points out frightening changes occurring in human behavior and the workings of the brain that have now become evident in our society’s younger generation and could have devastating consequences.

In the book The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr he argues how the internet is changing our brains or the worse. With the exception of the alphabets and the number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. At the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book. Carr explains how powerful the internet is by its ability to change the development of the brain, how people think, and the ability to remember.

In the article “From The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” Nicholas Carr continually reiterates the argument that the Internet is altering how we think. “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry” (Carr par. 2). Carr makes the point that he was always a voracious reader, but the fact that he uses the Internet so much for his job has changed the way he thinks and processes information. Over the course of the article he explains why this is the case. He uses the Internet not only for work, but for almost every other aspect of life including shopping, traveling, reading and numerous other activities.

The internet can be great source of information, but it has a negative effect on the human brain. In Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, he describes how the internet has negatively effected his brain by stating, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (Carr 733). The internet has a huge impact on the thinking process of the human brain and it is completely changing the human ability to concentrate for long periods of time, human reading skills, and the configuration of the brain.

This day in age, technology is more present in our lives than it’s ever been. Every day we constantly check our phones, emails, tablets, and even smart watches. These devices have opened doors that we previously didn't even know existed. They are outlets to unlimited knowledge from all over the world. Although many people, including me, have grown up with these commodities, they are still extremely new. Home computers have only been mainstream for 20 years or so, while smartphones have only been mainstream for about 5 years! What all this leads itself to, is that we are just now able to observe the way this new technology and instant access to knowledge can affect our brain. Author, Nicholas Carr, believes that the world’s largest search engine, Google, has molded our brains to be incapable of deep thought, and that it also even makes us stupid.

According to the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Perception & Performance, an “increasing proportion of these are ‘smartphones’.

At first, I was going to analyze and write about smartphones, however I found it more efficient to write also about a particular smartphone to narrow it down from such a broad technological artifact, such as answering who designed it, what for, what their position and the impact they want to have on society was, and their future visions. Therefore, I chose the iPhone as the centerpiece of smartphones I will be analyzing and an emphasis on applications. However, some of this information is relevant and interchangeable to all other smartphones. IPhones and smartphones allow us to access constant information and offer it the way we want it, as it is completely customizable now to fit our learning style. They keep us organized, send information to us in different ways, even shape and offer solutions such as for politics, economies, problems whether individual ones or globally. Smartphones capitalize on shared knowledge and has opened the door to inventors and those who have the knowledge to make our world a more connected place and lives easier by sharing it with us to use. We are able to communicate with other people far off, through space-time compression or shrinking-space to gather news and information.

Pew (2017) examined the change in ownership of smartphones over time in the United States, the relationship to owning other mobile devices, and the prevalence of smartphone dependency. American are increasingly connected to the “digital” world via smartphones and other mobile devices. According to Pew research surveys in 2017 over 95% of Americans own a cellphone of some kind while 77% own and operate a smartphone. The percentage of smartphone ownership has increased tremendously compared to the first survey conducted in 2011, where only 35% of Americans had a smartphone. Smartphone ownership also exhibits a wide variation based on age, household income and educational attainment while maintaining a correlation with ownership of other mobile devices.