The Shallowss And The Brain Analysis

Because of the scattered nature of the internet, it has created an environment where the brain is neurologically changing and physically losing the cognitive brain function.

If a person wishes to be up to date on what is going on the world around them, in all facets and walks of life, then they must spend a considerable portion of time merely skimming the water of each pool of knowledge, never having the time to truly sink their feet in. This correlates directly back to the massively increased availability of information and writings, whose shoulders Birkerts puts the blame of our loss upon. Nicholas Carr cites a study done on the “behavior of visitors to two popular research sites” which gives its users an even larger degree of online texts.

Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows, wrote his book to convince further society that the internet is having an adverse effect on their brains and how they are receiving information. His major thesis for the novel was expressed when he exclaimed, "...the Internet controls what we think and the process in which we think because with its efficiency and speed, we are formulating all of our thoughts through the speed of the internet rather than through the speed of our mind." Throughout the novel, Carr discusses multiple reasons on how we have changed to depend on the internet. As well as how we have let go of older versions of technology and methods of learning because they seem insufficient compared to the internet. Carr was very biased

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 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 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.

In his essay “The Net Is a Waste of Time,” novelist William Gibson analyzes the hidden potentials of the Internet in both its vastness and affect on society. He writes this piece at the dawn of the Internet, and during this undeveloped phase, he discusses its multitude of facts as is and will be. As hinted in the title of his essay, Gibson takes the stance that the Internet at its early stages is a waste of time -- an impressively large and complex waste of time -- but a waste of time nonetheless. He is ultimately concerned with how we are choosing to procrastinate through the Internet, and that our growing attachment and dependence on the Internet reveals a “fatal naïveté” (697) about us. Gibson also brings up the true enormity of the Web even at its premature standing, detailing how “the content of the Web aspires the absolute variety. One might find anything there. It is like rummaging in the forefront of the collective global mind” (697). Despite his concerns on what the Web might become, Gibson realizes that at the time of his writing, the Web was at a stage much like the larval stage of a butterfly’s life -- seems unassuming, but as he himself puts it, “The Web is new, and our response to it has not yet hardened” (697), and that there are “big changes afoot” (696).

Nicholas Carr covers an unprecedented amount of material in his novel, “The Shallows.” He delves into subjects ranging from the history of the book to the business of Google to the psychological concept of neuroplasticity. All of these topics support his main argument: the idea that the internet is destroying our brains. He takes the deterministic approach that we are the tools we use, meaning they shape our brains. According to Carr, the internet negates our memories, deems print books useless, and distracts us from reality. His counterargument comes from the instrumentalist approach; this viewpoint maintains that people stay the same no matter the tools they use. His arguments are both sound and flimsy, current and outdated, and he rants

For instance, as Nicholas explained how links make it simpler to jump between digital documents than printed ones, he also mentioned, “ A search engine often draws our attention to a particular snippet of text, a few words or sentences that have strong relevance to whatever we’re searching for at the moment, while providing little incentive for taking in the work as a whole” (Carr 91). Unlike printed articles, books, or texts, digital documents make it possible for us to go through information quickly just to find what we need. The problem with this is that we continue to follow this method for everything we read on the Net and after a while, we become accustomed to this way of reading; thus, creating a less intelligent way of skimming through passages and not being able to interpret the text as a whole. Glancing through words hasn’t just turned into the norm; it’s becoming a part of our daily habits.

In The Shallows Carr includes a tale of Phillip Davis, a doctoral student, introducing his friend to the internet and becoming frustrated when his friend kept pausing to read web pages she found. Davis recounts, “ ‘You’re not supposed to read web pages, just click on the hypertexted words!’ ”(Carr 7). This statement may seem brash but it is not wrong, the Internet is not the ideal environment for individuals who want to pause and assess ever bit of information given, if that were the case one would turn on his or her computer to write an email and within three hours have gotten nowhere. From all the pop ups, side ads, and recommendations along a web page taking the time to evaluate each and every bit of information would take ages, and this discourages a mentality of linear reading and full analysis. Moreover, Carr describes how an Israeli company allows users to view the amount of time people spent on their website from around the world, the result showed that now matter were they were located they all spent a minimal amount on each website before clicking away. Carr states, “ On the Web, there is no such think as leisurely browsing. We gather as much information as quickly as our eyes and fingers can move”(Carr

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

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.