In response to reading, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr, I am going to attempt to write this blog post in four paragraphs or less. My reason being is that in this article, Carr talks about how new technologies, mainly the Internet, are shortening our attention spans and making it more difficult to immerse ourselves into what we read. He pools together various opinions from fellow scholars in an attempt to show us that the convenience of the Internet is even hurting those who have invested their careers in reading and becoming educated so it is reasonable to believe that we are all being affected. Carr tries to state this point by using a quote from Bruce Friedman that states, "Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much too absorb."
However, in the process of trying to articulate his theory,
Carr unknowingly, I would assume, proves his point. The article is seven single spaced pages of
text and uses some examples, which are in my opinion, too loosely associated
with the debate. Needless to say if a
well-educated, seasoned scholar like Friedman has trouble paying attention for
more than four paragraphs, an undergraduate student like myself wasn't going to
survive the entire article.
The fact of the matter is Carr was right. Although Google may not be making us dumber,
it's efficiency is shortening our attention spans. As much as I hate to admit it, I began losing
focus after a few pages and needed to check ESPN.com in order to give my brain
a break. Maryanne Wolf stated my
situation perfectly when she said, "We are not only what we read, we are
how we read." Meaning, as Carr
paraphrased it, "efficiency [and] immediacy may be weakening our capacity
for deep reading.”
The Internet has done some amazing things for our society, such as, providing us with endless amounts of information or granting us immediate knowledge on any subject we can imagine. However, there are some downsides to this new technology and one happens to be our inability to maintain focus for long periods of time. It's not necessarily a bad thing but it is something our society as a whole needs to start accounting for. Seeing as this is my fourth paragraph I've probably lost a majority of you all by now, but, that is just the reality of the world we live in today.
Discussion Questions to Ponder:
Are humans doomed to the short attention spans we've created for ourselves or is there a way to teach our brains to think deeper again?
If the Internet took down advertisements and pop-ups (aka distractions) could we learn to read deeply on the Internet?
