Cost Of Technology

Technology nowadays always use to have so much information at our fingertips, but is this a good thing? That is what Jamais Cascio’s “Get Smarter” and Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” both discuss; they specifically address the effects that new technology, such as the internet, has on the way humans think. The difference is that Carr argues that this new technology is making us stupid while Cascio argues that it is making us smarter. Nicholas Carr’s article discusses the negative effects of the internet and technology like it. It specifically mentions slight changes in the way people do things because of the influence of technology and gives many historical and anecdotal examples. Jamais Cascio’s article is about the advancements of technology and how it is makes people smarter. Cascio talks about Twitter, mental enhancement drugs and AIs, focusing a lot on the benefits of the advancements.

In “Does the Internet Make You Smarter or Dumber?” Nicholas Carr argues that although the Internet allows us to access a groundbreaking amount of information, there is evidence that it is making us perfunctory thinkers. Carr believes this due to the division of attention that the Internet allows us to have, so therefore we are not processing and storing the information we see online. In contrast, Carr states that we need to pay deep attention to process and store information as memory. Carr sites an experiment conducted by Patricia Greenfield and concluded that our way of thinking is becoming more superficial.

Nicholas Carr is the brilliant author of The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains. In the Shallows, Carr discusses the unassailable issue that many countries face today. Not only teenagers, but more and more adults as well, have been using technology more often than ever. Yes, almost everyone has a so-called “smart phone” in their pocket. But the question that is presented in this book is: Is the latest technology actually smart, or are the advanced systems just making us less intelligent?

A large portion of the world’s older generation possesses the mindset that smartphones are decreasing our intelligence. This view has been held for years and is understandable, but Daniel T. Willingham presents a different idea in his article “Smartphones Don’t Make Us Dump”. Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and is the author of Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do. He gears his article towards the parents of the future generations; correcting their misconceptions and inserting a proper one using logos.

The younger generation of Americans, those under the age of thirty, are often criticized as being the “dumbest generation”. Many Americans blame technology for making “goods so plentiful, schooling so accessible, diversion so easy, and liberties so copious” (Bauerlein). Many are posing the question: Is the increasing ease in life causing our intelligence to slip? Those under thirty are not the dumbest generation, in fact, technology is expanding, changing, and pushing in new directions intelligence and mental capacity.

Imagine that you are cruising town on your way to pick up some Taco Bell with one of your best friends. “So what are your plans for this weekend?” You ask. Buzz… Buzz… Buzz… and your friend reaches into his pocket to retrieve his phone to read a tweet and responds, “Oh, Yes, that is so cool!” And they begin to type as fast and furious as his thumbs will enable to respond. Has this ever happened to you? There are two sides to the topic of whether or not cell phones are making us stupid. Authors Andrew Keen and David Weinberger argue the the yes and no sides to answer that debate in the article, “Are smartphones Making Us Stupid?” from upfront magazine. Both authors make a compelling argument for the thier sides of the story, but it really can’t be directly argued either way because it isn’t a black

Even though smart phones are supposed to make working easier, studies have shown that they actually hurt our performance. In 2015, a Journal of Experimental Psychology study had 166 people to test. The experiment was to have the participants work on a challenging task while their phones start beeping and buzzing. The results showed that the worker became messier and had their attention elsewhere, whether or not they checked their phone. Dr. Adrian Ward is a psychologist and marketing professor at the University of Texas at Austin, he has been working with the effects of smart phones on our thoughts and decision making. Dr. Ward believes that we have grown so attached to our phones that they reduce our intelligence with their presence. To test this theory, Dr. Ward and three colleagues began a clever experiment to test his idea. They decided to enlist 520 undergraduate students at UCSD and make them perform two standard tests of intellectual acuity. The first test evaluated “available cognitive capacity”, it’s a test to measure how fully a person’s mind can focus on a single task. The second test gauged “fluid intelligence”, a person’s ability to understand and answer an unfamiliar problem. The only difference was the location of the student’s smart phone. Some students had their phone on the desk, while others had it in their bag or pocket. Others were even asked to leave their phone in a different room. The results of this test showed that “As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased” (pg.3).

Diamond touches on the idea that passive entertainment, a type of entertainment in which there is little to no interactivity, such as television, may be effecting our ability to think critically. We seem to be more prone to experiencing this form of entertainment in America because as we grow more technologically advanced, our generation relies on these technologies to entertain us. It is found that in the average American household, the television is on for around 7 hours a day. Since stimulation and activity in the brain as a child are so important to mental development, as more and more kids are raised with less brain stimulation in their childhood, we are more liable to raising people incapable of thinking at high critical

This means that people rarely pay attention to what they are reading in the website. They do not focus on the text because there are too many distractions.It is not useful using only the internet. Many teenager use the internet and use the phone or put music while they find information and barely concentrated. However, Patricia Greenfield, a developmental psychologist who runs UCLA’s Children’s Digital Media Center review many studies on how media technology influence our way of thinking. Some of the studies indicate that video games and computer task increase the ability to focus more, but others studies indicate that it barely focus and it was more as an “automatic” thinking(Children media center). This show on how it can impact a human brain and not focus on what you are doing or

Have you ever once stopped to think that technology might be making us stupid? Or is it making us smarter? Well Nicholas Carr stated “The fact is, you'll never think deeply if you're always googling, texting, and surfing.” Furthermore, Nicholas Carr says that ,”We are never really using our brains because of technology and the benefits we have today to make our life easy. In this essay I will present three of the top reasons on why modern day technology is having a great effect on are IQ scores. So first we'll see why we're always distracted. Then we'll talk about why finding lots of information quickly doesn't make us smart it's how we think about that information deeply. Last but not least we'll talk about why technology makes us smarter.

There has been debate on how the growth of technological inventions is influencing the way humans think. For teenagers and young adults in my generation, it’s rather easy to adapt to new advancements since we grew up being introduced to so many inventions that took over the entire world’s interest in the past decade. I personally prefer to multitask than to focus on one task at hand and I can record more information in a less amount of time when I type on a keyboard. Therefore, I have an easier time learning and getting things done with techy tools than when I sit upright with just a pen and paper. But most skeptics that assume technology is a disease would argue that technology’s versatility and convenience could be a distracting to our thought process. In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” author Nicholas Carr believes that the progress in technological innovation has had a derailing effect on our cognition; however, in the article, “Smarter Than You Think,“ Clive Thompson addresses how collaborating with today’s technological advances can actually give more opportunities to bring about more intelligence. Although Carr addresses how technology can be a major challenge to our critical thinking skills, Thompson arguably provides better evidence to show how technology actually challenges our skills to for the better by teaching us how to be more aware, giving us the opportunity to access the most amount of information, and creating a higher field of expertise for the

For years smart phones has given us access to the Internet a vast place to quickly find information on any subject imaginable. It seems like a never -ending digital book of information. With the click of a button it can take mere seconds to find information that would have taken hours to find in an encyclopedia or a dictionary. As easy as the Internet makes it to find information, there are still a few people who are concerned that it has affected their ability to focus on information as a whole. The question at hand is, Are Smart Phones Making Us Stupid?

College graduates are having trouble finding jobs and are still living at home. “For young college graduates, [the] unemployment rate is currently 8.5 percent and for young high school graduates, [the] unemployment rate is 22.9 percent” (Shierholz et al. 3, 4). On the other hand, Apple iPhones are selling better than ever. Apple has been able to change the behaviors of young people, which has created a cultural addiction for expensive mobile technologies. In Dr. Larry D. Rosen’s book “iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us, brings attentions to how technology is changing our brain’s ability to process information.” Technology is causing addictive behaviors almost as bad as drugs and alcohol.”

I have a smartphone and you probably have a smartphone, too. Although many believe smartphones are making us stupid, there is something about them that is making us smart. Many people say that smartphones are bad for us but many disagree. We use Google, Bing, and Yahoo to answer our questions and solve our problems. Once we know the answers, that means we learned something. We share facts and ideas on social media networks. We also read articles about how the world is changing. So, even though smartphones are framed as “unhelpful,” they, actually, are making us smarter.

Is the internet making us smarter or dumber? People continuously argue whether this rise of electronic use and internet in our lives is a negative or positive aspect. In June 5, 2010 Wall Street Journal article, Nicholas Carr raises and answer the intriguing question,“Does the Internet Make You Dumber?”Nicholas Carr argues that the internet has bad effects on our brain. He says that the internet makes it harder to remember anything, and that is harder to move memories into long term memory. Those who are continually distracted by emails, alerts, and text messages understand less than a person who can concentrate. Nicholas Carr points that the internet can change the way our brain acts. He states that those who use the internet are shallow, and the internet is causing irreversible damage to our thought processes and making us stupid. A week later, Steven Pinker counters Nicholas Carr’s assertions in his own New York Time article,“Mind Over Mass Media.”He argues that electronic technologies are not as horrible as some may make it seem, and he starts his article by addressing how“New forms of media have always caused moral panics”(199). Throughout his article, Pinker explains why critics, who accuse electronic technology as harming to human intelligence, are wrong. He suggests that,“these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart”(200). Through media and social networking, the internet brings people closer together and provides convenience for people’s life.