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When I finished reading Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr, I found myself relating to what Carr had to say. He claims that his reading skills are diminishing due to Google and the way that the internet want us to think. I used to read quite a lot at a young age, and like Carr, find it relatively difficult to immerse myself in a good book compared to the past. The way our minds work has changed based on the way information is presented to us. We are conditioned to have many things open at once, "television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets". I have noticed this in my Cosmo magazines (insert judgement here). They have a page at the beginning that gives the reader the low-down on the magazine if they do not have the time to read the whole thing.
Carr later discusses how the invention of the clock changed our lives forever. No longer did we do what we want when we wanted, we had to follow societal rules based on this new machine. He compares it to the Internet. We no longer have to search through countless books in search of new information: we can now just 'Google' it, and the information is at our fingertips. Although many people focus on the negatives of having a greater amount of technology in our possession, many people do not recognize the advantages that it gives us. Do you think that the advancement of the internet is a positive thing or a negative? Are people too dependent on the internet and technology in their lives?
Similar to Carr, Electracy by Gregory Ulmer starts off discussing how "we are to the internet what students of Plato and Aristotle were to the Academy and Lyceum". He then goes into how the Internet has sparked many inventions of its own. I noticed that he looks at the more positive aspects of the internet and advancement relative to Carr's criticisms. Although I did have a harder time interpreting Ulmer's work, I think that people should compare the negative and positive aspects of the internet. I know that I waste too much time on Pinterest and Twitter but it also helps me with research papers, and my lifestyle (vegan). I would not know as much as I would without the internet, so the question is, is the internet ideally a positive thing or negative? Is it used solely for the purpose of money-making or scholarly expeditions?
