Essay Does the Internet Make You Dumber

Whitcomb claims that the Internet will make people smarter in the next 10 years. To support his claim he conducted an online survey of 895 Web users and experts found more than three-quarters believe that, internet will make them smarter in next 10 years. The second claim is that the internet improves writing and reading skills of an individual. Study co-author Janna Anderson, director of the Imagining the Internet Center said “Three out of four experts said our use of the Internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the Internet has improved reading, writing and the rendering of

The debate over the internet's influence on human minds has been long running. Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" article successfully defends both opinions on this issue. He has plenty of history on the topic and has seen much success in previous works. Carr uses his past to impact the present issue society is challenged with every day. With his background on the subject, Carr is able to establish credibility as a speaker before he reasons for both sides of the debate successfully.

Carr describes how he thinks that the internet is making him lose his focus, he can't read for longer times, makes him uneasy and starting to look for a distraction while reading. Carr explains in depth in the article that how the internet is taking over our lives, we found

Carr has a more negative opinion about new technology than Cascio. Carr believes the internet and previous technological advancements have caused many changes in society, including reducing people’s ability to focus. Carr says, “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” This is just one of the many times that he blames the internet for the changes that have occurred in the past decade.

Media and technology are permeating and changing every part of our lives, but are there consequences to these changes? Nicholas Carr questions if the Internet is helping people as much as it is believed to in his essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” With an increased reliance on the Internet, Carr has found patterns of shortened attention in himself and among others. Carr points out frightening changes occurring in human behavior and the workings of the brain that have now become evident in our society’s younger generation and could have devastating consequences.

Most Americans use the internet daily. Although it is very useful, it is also very hurtful to the brains of everyone. Nicholas Carr goes into detail about why he feels this way in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. This article mentions researches and opinions from not only Carr, but from outsiders as well. Carr explains his reasons on why he feels the internet has limited the knowledge of everyone. The main reason that Carr argues is that our brains have the ability to reprogram themselves due to the use of the internet and I agree with him because we do not dig into books like in the past, we get on our social medias instead, however, I disagree with him because computers and the internet have helped the world tremendously with technology

In Nicholas Carr article titled “Does the Internet Make You Dumber”, uses Ethos, logos and pathos appeal throughout his article to convince his audience that the internet make you dumber.

We often encounter distractions all around in our daily lives. Our attention is divided between different tasks, which make it difficult to focus. The internet plays an important role in distracting individuals to focus the mind and sustain concentration. According to Nicholas Carr, “When we 're constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking.”(Carr 224). The internet plays an important role in why it is difficult for individuals to focus the mind and sustain concentration. The internet has many distractions that can often lead us to multitasks and not fully focus on one task. For example, I have seemed students in class using their laptops not for education purposes but searching

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

Finally, Carr uses logical arguments to support his idea that the internet is too distracting for people to be productive. Although some parts of his article Carr references experiments and opinions of scientists, not all of his arguments need such references because they are just logical arguments. For example, he talks about how people who go online while at work are less productive is a logical argument that makes sense and therefore doesn’t need a source for that argument. Or that the sounds of messages and emails popping up on someone’s computer can get someone unfocused. Carr has uses phrases like “It’s hardly surprising” in his paper to indicate that something is

Carr, Nicholas. Does the Internet Make You Dumber. New York City: Guardian, 2010. 3. Print.

The internet is an excellent place to explore our mind and put our thoughts together; however, it also has a negative effect to our brains, and the more we use it the more it decrease our intelligence. In this essay “Does the Internet Make You Smarter or Dumber?” by Nicholas Carr, he argues about the immoral side of the internet. According to Carr, “When we’re constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking” (22). Carr’s pint of view about the internet is that it does not make us smarter in any way; if anything it make us dense and slow. Scientific study have shown that most people who stayed on the internet quit a lot are more likely to damage their brains mentally. According to Carr, the internet is also a place to waste our time. Carr backed up his arguments with studies from scientists, researches and even books. In these essay, Carr’s appeals to logic and understanding is the strongest; whereas his appeals to ethos and his appeals to pathos are finite.

We become mere signal processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory. Carr illustrates how the Internet is making us more superficial as thinkers. He also states how the internet is an information rich environment that the net creates for us and that’s why we use it so much, he refers to words, sounds, pictures, texts and what this tends to do for us is promote a sort of compulsive behavior which we’re constantly checking our smartphone, constantly glancing at our e-mail inbox, and we are living in this perpetual state of distraction and interruption which is dangerous according to Carr because that mode of thinking, crowds out the more contemplate and calmer mode of thinking, and that focused calmed thinking is actually how we learn. That is a process is named memory consolidation. That means that the process of information from our short term working memory to our long term memory and its through moving information from your working memory to your long term memory that you create connections between that information and everything else you know. Carr believes that “attention is the key, and if we loose control of our attention or are constantly dividing our attention then we don’t really enjoy that consolidation process”. I disagree with this quote because I believe that we can also enjoy that

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.

B. Carr says the internet interferes with our richness of thoughts, because the internet distracts us in to many ways. Our focus has trouble narrowing in on retaining what needs to be learned. A quote from a nobel prize winner Eric Kandel which states when we pay deep attention to a new piece of information we are able to associate it “meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory.”  Carr’s conclusion for the future of college education was on a study at Cornell University, half the class was allowed to use internet connected devices during lecture, other half had to keep their computers shut. Those who borrowed the web performed worse. Problems like this can be solved by eliminating all outside distractions from