Does the Internet Make You Dumber?

In "Does the Internet Make You Dumber?" by Nicholas Carr he explains how the attention span of human are slowly deteriorating. Carr says “People who juggle many task are less creative and less productive than those who do one thing at a time,” by saying this he tells the reader that the internet is a multitasking network. Everything we need is always at the end of our finger tips and over the years of this convince our brains have learned to adapt to different learning techniques and technologies. He tells about how the Roman philosopher Seneca said it best when he said “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.” He goes on to prove this theory with experiments with college student using laptop versus notebooks/handwriting. The study found that the students on laptops would rapidly shift focus, were easily distracted, and were less able to differ between important information from random facts. The author then goes on to say how our minds will be constantly changing due to new technology. He then quotes a pioneering neuroscientist Michael Merzenich saying how our brains are being “massively remodeled” due to our increasing interest of the web and social media.

We chose this article because it relates to the idea found in "Staying Awake" that multitasking is causing us to lose our creativity and productivity. Carr points out that the innate ability of the human brain is to be distracted and that reading helps improve that. But since society values being good at multiple things, so multitasking is vital in today's society, again pushing reading to the side. Key words such as distractions, less creative and less productive, division of attention, shallower, and massively remodeled describe how the Internet is a technology that is decreasing our knowledge whereas reading could be increasing our knowledge.

#books #literature