Is Google Making Us Stupid In Writing Essays Text

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nicholas carr's essay is google making us stupid?, вќ is a reflection on the negative influences which google and the internet have on how we connect with the world and each other. Carr seems to take this influence somewhat personally as he at once sings the praises of the internet, and how it has been a godsend вќ to him as a writer, while condemning it for its sentient like powers, i've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory вќ 150. Information on how intellectual technologies вќ 154 have been working to change our minds for centuries. Carr speaks of going from a deep thinking person who would immerse himself in long prose, to a person who is easily distracted, experiences losses of concentration, drifts, becomes fidgety, and is always looking for something else to do. He relates his own experiences to his other literary friends who in turn have similarly alarming symptoms. Will you stop, dave? so the supercomputer hal pleads with the implacable astronaut dave bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of stanley kubrick’s 2001: a space odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain.

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Over the past few years i’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. 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. For more than a decade now, i’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the internet. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.

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A few google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and i’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote i was after. Even when i’m not working, i’m as likely as not to be foraging in the web’s info thickets’reading and writing e mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works they propel you toward them. For me, as for others, the net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. The perfect recall of silicon memory, wired ’s clive thompson has written. As the media theorist marshall mcluhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. When i mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances literary types, most of them many say they’re having similar experiences.

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The more they use the web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. What happened? he speculates on the answer: what if i do all my reading on the web not so much because the way i read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way i think has changed? bruce friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine. I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print, he wrote earlier this year.

A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the university of michigan medical school, friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a staccato quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. And we still await the long term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how internet use affects cognition. Conducted by scholars from university college london, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the british library and one by a u.k. Educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited a form of skimming activity, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would bounce out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report: it is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense indeed there are signs that new forms of reading are emerging as users power browse horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.

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Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the internet, not to mention the popularity of text messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking perhaps even a new sense of the self. We are not only what we read, says maryanne wolf, a developmental psychologist at tufts university and the author of proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain. Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the net, a style that puts efficiency and immediacy above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand.

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And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the chinese, 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. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works. Sometime in 1882, friedrich nietzsche bought a typewriter a malling hansen writing ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches.

He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. Once he had mastered touch typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. One of nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom, the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his ‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.

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