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Carr's Writing Style

Decent Essays

Technology evolves with time and changes the perspectives and culture of the society that it permeates, the internet is no exception in its role as a digital information highway of the modern world. Nicholas Carr uses data, examples, and repetition to structure his analysis of the above phenomenon, in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. With a varied collection of data, Carr illustrates the effects on reading styles due to the use of the internet. He sites qualitative data such as the changes traditional media like newspapers have had to change to keep readership in the digital age. The New York Times began including abstracts or “shortcuts” to provide a quick peek at the news rather than have the reader scour the pages. This mirrors …show more content…

In the beginning, he structures the opening paragraphs around his changing habits of reading and research. He expresses concern at his mental expectation that he can “take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles” (Paragraph 4). He then widens out to the consequences others experienced with the prevalence of technology. The differences between the writing systems, ideograms employ and "develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli" (paragraph 10). Through a consistent repetition, he lays out key facts and provides the reader with the incentive to consider the changes that they've experienced. By the conclusion of his paper, a reader can realize that their view of what is human and what makes a machine have blurred or even switched places. Carr’s writing explains where humans are through data, how the effects are taking place from the individual to the global world, and finally the haunting illustration of where humanity is more cruel and unfeeling than the machines. In a world with less and less deeper reading, the threat we pose to the future becomes more

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