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What Is The Internet Doing For Our Cognition?

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What is the Internet Doing to Our Cognition? 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. The first strategy Carr uses to claim that blogs and readings on the web are diminishing our cognitive abilities is the appeal to authority. As he explains his troubles with reading because of the web, he brings his fellow writer friends and shows that they are struggling with reading texts that are too long as well. He quotes Bruce Friedman, a pathologist from University of Michigan Medical School, “’I

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