An Analysis Of Nicholas Carr 's The Shallows : What The Internet Is Doing

“Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicolas Carr, argues that using the internet to read is less thought inciting then reading books. Carr has focused on the various claims that support the argument above. The writer claims that the Internet causes lack of concentration as it is full of ads, hyperlinks, and other media which is meant to distract us. This he gives the example of someone reading the latest headlines in a newspaper site when suddenly a new e-mail messages announces its arrival with a tone of some sort. He says that the “The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.” The next claim he makes is that the way we read on the Internet is changing how we use our brains to think; therefore making us less contemplative. Carr mentions Maryanne Wolf who works as a developmental psychologist at Tufts University. Wolf believes that when we read online we become “mere decoders of information”. I believe that Carr uses this example to give the illusion that when we read online we don’t truly gain knowledge but instead we just gather more information.

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

Over the past two weeks, I have been reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas G. Carr. In the book, the author discusses the various effects of the Internet not only on our minds both physically and mentally, but also how it affects our race's actions and behaviors. I have spent the past two weeks reading this book, and I finished reading 280 pages in 325 minutes. Like the previous book I read, I chose this book because the subject was something that I haven't really explored before in other books that I have read, and my goal is to try to read at least a book every two weeks, When reading this book, I sometimes found myself confused, for reading about the brain's structure and how it functions wasn't something

In Nicholas Carr's book, "What the Internet is Doing to our Brains: The Shallows," he describes how technology has affected our way of thinking, and eventually caused us to become shallow individuals that are incapable of connecting with others. I think that Carr is for the most part correct, and technology, more specifically the internet is causing human interaction to happen less and less. Technology has done wonders for humans as a species, from being able to watch your favorite television show on Netflix to being able to find an essay online about a book you read. Despite all these great things, the internet is doing more harm than good. More often than not, you can walk into a store or restaurant and see someone hunched over on their

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

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, author of the novel “The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains” explains in his works that media and technology is affecting the way our brain works and is used in our daily lives. Carr states, “The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation. The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies. The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities - those for reason, perception, memory, emotion.”(Carr, 211) Carr continues to explain an interesting phenomena that occurred in society within the

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, questions the impact the technology has upon our lives. He argues that the internet prevents our ability to engage in deep reading and thus restricts our ability to think critically. He says this is due to the idea of neuroplasticity, which is where our brains change in order to adapt to the different stimuli it encounters. When books were first introduced, our brain had to rewire itself in order to achieve the ability to focus for long periods of time on text and to think deeply about it. This resulted in a literate deep thinker. However, the internet has forced our brain to rewire itself again. Carr says that “there is evidence that the cells of our brains literally develop and grow bigger with use, and atrophy or waste away with disuse” (22). Our brain has many structures that perform specific functions and the structures associated with deep thinking can decrease and eventually will serve no function if we don’t use it. We are much better thsn our ancestors. According to Carr, “the oral world of our distant ancestors may well have had emotional and intuitive depths we can no longer appreciate” (56). In other words, Carr believes that people in the past engaged in focused, immersed thinking. I believe that Nicholas Carr is right when he says that the internet is changing the way we think, however I don’t believe that we need to turn off the internet in order to reduce the chances of losing

In The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, he asserts that the evolution of information and communication technology (ICTs) is having a detrimental impact on our brains despite the many benefits and advances we have made with it. His main focus is on the internet which he commonly refers to as the “universal medium” (92). Carr presents a very detailed but biased argument in which he views the internet and other technologies as the adversary of critical thinking and progress. To Carr, we are sacrificing our ability to think logically because we are choosing a simpler way to gain knowledge.

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.

Attention to Nicholas Carr and his argument about technology it’s destroying our brains and affecting the world, the new generation and everyone. In recent discussions of the shallows, a controversial issue has been whether the internet is truly affecting us or not. On the other hand, however, others argue that the internet is making them more creative and some say it’s making them smarter. The best point in view on this issue, is reflected by Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows when he writes, “ The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation.” ( Carr,211). This insightful perspective demonstrates the truth of the matter; the price we pay to spend our day on the internet or using any other technology is alienation. That means

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

As technology begins to advance every day it starts to have a large impact on us humans, not only on just our lifestyle but also the way we prefer to receive information. In the novel The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr, he proclaims a biased argument about the internet consequently how it is changing our ability to think logically because we are choosing the easier route to gain knowledge. Additionally, argues that due to Google we lack our critical thinking skills causing less knowledge to be created. The Internet is designed to connect people on a personal and commercial level, on the other hand, Carr rejects that idea, moreover views it as making us individuals more shallow by using the Internet. Despite the benefits the internet has, it is degrading us and we don’t even know it.

Andy Clark, who was the director of cognitive studies at Indiana University stated, “Technology like the internet is making us smarter, because it is increasing our capacity to network with” (Clark). Our brains are adapting to knew things the internet provides. New technology allows us to get rid of the old ways such as reading books and allows us to acquire new skills to better our learning not worsen them. However, throughout Carr’s essay, he continues to argue that the internet gives us a false sense of knowledge. Carr argues that him and his friends lost their ability to focus when reading because of the internet. It is likely that they are not up to speed with the changes in society. Technology has increased drastically over the authors lifetime. I believe that the internet has proven to be very beneficial to the people who use it and it has helped speed up the advancement of our technology and disagree with the assumptions that Carr makes about the rate at which we retrieve

In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Nicholas Carr an American writer who has published books and articles on technology, business, and culture states “ I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages”. I believe this is just one of the numerous ways technological advancements have spiked our need for stimulation and dulled our sense of acceptance with solitude and boredom.