Technology today has become so mainstream that it has replaced almost everything we do with new inventions and innovations to make things easier. The internet is one form of technology that has became apart of our everyday lives and it has changed the way we are. The internet is so versatile and always changing that you will never see everything you can within your lifetime. You can search the web for a story on dogs and end up seeing over millions of different stories on dogs from many different people. Not only does the internet provide a vast amount of information on one topic, the amount of hyperlinks, pop ups, and ads you see while surfing the web makes can make a ten minute search for a story on dogs a 4 hour long YouTube binge watching. When someone searches the internet the amount of gifs, memes, and funny prank videos they see along with the convenience and easy access of it makes them forget about what life was like without the internet and what we used to use when we didn’t have it.
Reading is just one thing that has changed overtime along with the new innovations with technology. Technology has changed how many people read today because years ago when we didn’t have the internet there was only paper items to read. As years have went by and the internet has evolved many people have stopped using paper reading or use them a lot less then before because of how much easier and convenient it is and how it allows you to read so much more on many different topics or by different authors quickly. However, nothing is ever perfect and with every pro there is a con to go with it.
In the article, “Is google making us stupid?” we can see some of the pros and cons that are directly related to using the internet over paper reading (Carr). To understand more about the article written we first look at who Nicholas Carr is as a writer. Carr is an American writer who focuses a lot of his articles and books on technology, culture, and business. He has written for a lot of publishers like The Atlantic, The Wall Street, New York Times, etc. (Carr). His focus on technology and its positive and negative impact on our life is shown in many of his pieces of work including “Is google making us stupid”. In this article he shows us the pros and cons of reading on the internet and gives us his overall experience and opinion with online reading (Carr).
The article was written in August of 2008 which is pretty recent when the internet is now being used all the time now (Carr, Is google making us stupid?). In the 2000s we see a big increase in the amount of technology we use on a daily basis. This article being published around the time of the technology boom makes a lot of sense and many people have started to use the internet more and more during this time and reading online also became more prevalent. Since the article was posted around this time then more people will be able to relate to their experiences with reading online with Carr’s. The article was published on The Atlantic which is a large newspaper establishment and this will allow more people to read his article and get his message out.
The article was also published to an online newspaper article and instead of print. This further goes along with his argument when he argues the pros and cons of reading online vs reading from paper. Reading this article online allows the reader to see exactly what Carr is talking about when he talks about how reading online can be very distracting for a reader when we talks about all of the hyperlinks, pop ups, and ads we see in the article (Carr, Is google making us stupid?).
The purpose of the article was to explain to the reader how using the internet changes the way we are able to read and process the information we are reading (Carr, Is google making us stupid?). Carr talks about how reading on the internet has shown that it has negatively affected how we read because we are not able to read as much and concentrate or comprehend on it due to the fact that the internet and he says “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory” (Is google making us stupid?). The internet is set up a lot differently than paper reading making is easier to get distracted while reading. Many people also prefer to read things on the internet rather than paper because it is easier and they are able to skim an article and find information easier then reading a whole book (Carr, Is google making us stupid?). In the article Carr tells us that even though the internet does have many cons to it, we shouldn’t stop using it completely but just understand the negatives it may have and find a way to be able to work around them.
Anyone who reads on the internet or with paper can read and take something away from this article. The article directed towards middle age people that have experienced both paper and internet reading at equal amounts. For someone to really understand and relate to Carr’s argument they would have needed to experience both online reading and paper reading to understand the difference between online and paper reading and they can possibly relate to the changes in how they read. Carr also directs the article to people that are growing up with nothing but technology surrounding them. He wants them to see that the just because the internet seems like a easy and great thing to use, everything has its negatives as well as its positives. This allows them to be able to relate the article more to see if they are affected just like the Carr explains in his article about how ready online affects us (Is google making us stupid?)
Link to voiceover video:
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