“In 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended” (Turkle). As technology keeps growing and growing we find that it has an effect on many things. Nicholas Carr and Sherry Turkle’s articles both relate to how Google is effect many people today. However, Carr’s article focuses more on how it is affected our ability to concentrate and contemplate, while Turkle’s article shows how we have lost the ability to connect with others. “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 …show more content…
Although, their points come from different ends they relate to one another really well. In Carr’s view, “even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it” (773). While according to Turkle, “college students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time. (Turkle). Both of these example then show the reader how people have lost the ability to deep thought and to be able to concentrate and really absorb or process information. In Turkle’s example, for someone to be able to type a text message while looking someone in the eye, they might appear to be paying attention and engaged in the conversation when really they’re not processing any of the information being told to them. While on the other hand, Carr’s example shows us
Carr went on farther, saying that he cannot read as long as he used to, his concentration starts to wonder after two or three pages. He states, “he began to get fidgety and lose his focus and start looking for other things to do.”
Many people are not mindful of how technology is disconnecting us from one another. When people pull out smartphones during a conversation or social gathering they will cause others to feel disconnected. These phones allow people to withdraw from what is happing now and move another situation reducing the quality of the conversation that is within our reach. In the essay "Stop Googling. Let's Talk" by Sherry Turkle; she believes that we are becoming a culture of short chats versus growing our culture of thinkers that are open to sharing in constructive and meaningful conversations with one another.
Carr mentions his personal experience with technology and how it has affected him. He points out his “concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages” (961). Carr isn’t the only one who has been affected by technology; he tells us that even his “acquaintances” have had similar experiences. His acquaintances say, “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing” (962). What once used to come natural to us has become difficult. People used to rely on books for multiple reasons when it came to research but now that technology has been used more frequently books are not that common. Carr says “Research that once required days . . . can be done in minutes” (962). Carr is mentioning the benefits of the Internet, for his argument he is using both sides so that the reader can relate to his article and understand where he is coming from. Carr quotes Marshall McLuhan when he points out that “the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” (962). Although fast research is great and easy to access it has its flaws. Carr mentions that
I choose to write about Doctorow’s article because I often find myself getting distracted both before and during the process of writing a paper. Much like Doctorow, I’d been instructed by several high school teachers to stay away from the Internet while writing so I didn’t divert my attention away from the assignment I was supposed to be working on. During the first three years of high school, I followed this advice almost religiously, and even went so far
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.
Students may easily lose their attention and concentration with easy access to such incredibly rich store of information. With such new technologies as television, internet and social networks, people nowadays tend to multitask more often as they have easy access to large amount of information. However, such easy access may sometimes be a distraction. Study report “Your Brain on Computers” shows that heavy multitaskers perform up to 20% worse on most tests compared to performance of light multitaskers. Working efficiency of people, who multitask, are claimed to be significantly lower. The same is with concentration. As a result, they are not engaged in working process. Students tend to be easily distracted with this situation. For example, combining doing homework with operating on Twitter, phone or YouTube results in poor engagement of a student into deep thinking process, according to Winifred Gallagher, who is the author of Rapt. He also points out that nowadays high school and college students have decreased capacity of serious thinking because of multitasking and distraction. Moreover, Tyler Cowen, economist and famous blogger, claims that nowadays information tends to come in shorter and smaller portions and that explains why our generation encourages short reading. Since online information is always presented in short written passages, the web prevents user from concentration and contemplation. As an illustration, Nicholas Carr, the speaker at MIT and Harvard,
In the article, “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.”, Sherry Turkle claims that technology is leaving us vulnerable to the world. Cell phones along with other technology can be detrimental in certain situations. She bases her claim off of several experiments done with all ages of kids and technology. The article, written in 2015 and published in the Sunday Review, targets how the conversations today are becoming shallow because the world attached to their phones. Even though Turkle’s argument that conversations are dying and are shallow, her article shows evidence that conversations are different when phones are in sight. She offers vital information and evidence about scenarios where conversations are changed because of the use technology. She provides statements and facts that are true to our everyday lives especially our lives with technology.
It is true that people are becoming more and more reliant on the internet to do everyday tasks. I feel that Carr addresses the issue perfectly in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. If we continue to use technology for everything, we will eventually lose all ability to deep read and make those critical connections that are necessary for true comprehension and application. He indicates that “the more [he] uses the web, the more he has to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing” (736). Knowing how difficult it was to read and analyze Carr’s article myself, I fully agree with his claims. Having grown up in a world that has always had technology, I must be hyper-cognizant of the task at hand when it comes to something such as reading, particularly if it is something that I deem less than interesting. When I was finally able to get through the entire essay, I started to think about how much I use the internet. I must admit that
Can you imagine life without your cell phone? Does the thought give you anxiety? These days, technology plays a huge role in our everyday lives. You can do just about anything on the web and a smart phone provides instant access. In her article “Growing up Tethered,” author and founder of MIT Initiative on Technology and the Self Sherry Turkle discusses the attachments people have with their cell phones, the web, social media, and technology all together. Turkle speaks with numerous high school students about the relationship they have with their phone and the issues that arise from being tethered to it. We learn that communicating through mobile devices and the web takes the personal emotion out of the conversation, and real life interactions
There is no denying the incredible library of knowledge the internet has made readily available for all to use. Having such a resource is transforming modern society in many ways, as it brings insight and news across the world at a moment’s notice, all the while enhancing educational and technological advancements. However, according to Sven Birkets, an American essayist and literacy critic, in his essay, “The Owl Has Flown”, it is not without fault as observations are to be made on how this new resource has transformed people’s intelligence and wisdom. The author theorizes that the large, almost unlimited, library that is now being offered by services such as the internet, reshapes the public’s knowledge. Knowledge is transformed to be horizontal or insubstantial compared to the much deeper lateral understanding pertaining to older generations because of the amount of time they spent dwelling on a much smaller set of resources. This observation made by Birkets in the late 90’s is expanded upon, and modernized by Nicholas Carr, an American writer and author, in a more inflicting and self-reflecting article for The Atlantic magazine entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains”. Carr does not just blame the Google search engine in this claim, but the internet as a whole on how it impacts concentration and our ability to contemplate. These cognitive impacts are observed and explained in more scientific terms by Eric Jaffe, a regular Observer
He mentions that others he has talked to that are the literary type, have noticed some of the same situations going on (5). He also makes mention of a pathologist who blogs about computer use and medicine, who states, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print... Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it” (6). What this tells us is that we use the internet too much and that we no longer retain knowledge because it is readily available at our fingertips. This has not been proven to be the
In his article for The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Nicholas Carr gives the argument of how the internet is changing the way people are now reading less than they used to a century ago. People all over are becoming less interested in reading material that is longer than a few pages sometimes they can't even comprehend to finish reading a paragraph. The concentration someone had while reading a lengthy book is now gone, one of the smallest distractions can get your attention even just boredom itself can make you drift away from your reading. The more time people spend online, the more their ability to concentrate on their readings diminish until they no longer can stay focused on reading something that is longer than three sentences. Because of the way the use of internet on a daily use has made it more efficient for people to search and find what they were looking for right away, the need to be searching through books or other types of informational mediums, is no longer something that is done as often, sense it would take less time and effort to look something up rather than read through a book to find the
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
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
The internet is our conduit for accessing a wide variety of information. In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr discusses how the use of the internet affects our thought process in being unable to focus on books or longer pieces of writing. The author feels that “someone, or something, has been tinkering with [his] brain” over the past few years (Carr 731). While he was easily able to delve into books and longer articles, Carr noticed a change in his research techniques after starting to use the internet. He found that his “concentration often [started] to drift after two or three pages” and it was a struggle to go back to the text (Carr 732). His assertion is that the neural circuits in his brain have changed as a