In the article, Nicholas Carr starts with talking about distractions and loss of attention. He can tell that his brain is changing, being re-wired or redirected to other stimulus as he tries to read. As a writer, the internet has sped up his research process. He went from spending days deeply searchingthrough books to now clicking on links in just a second, skimming through information. He describes this by saying, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
His friend Scott Karp explains that having once been a literature major in college and once an intense book reader, he now struggles to keep attention after just a few pages. He states that the way he reads hasn’t changed, the way he thinks has changed. He admits that he skims through lines because even the few pages he reads is too much to absorb. We are now so used to reading short emails, passages, or texts that we struggle to remain focused during long increments. Our brain isn’t wired how it used to be.
Friedrich Nietzschediscovered that “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” In the article, he was referring to his type writing experience. We discuss this in our class when talking about the differences in writing on paper vs typing an email or using a screen.
The internet is everything we need and have ever used. The article states that the internet is, “our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.” Google basically has the answer to all our questions. Brin and Paige, the inventors of Google, stated that the search engine is our form of artificial intelligence. The thought of our brains needing to “operate as high-speed data-processing machines” is unsettling. We are not programmed to have every answer to every question as Google does though with all this information and answers at our fingertips, I believe we are working towards becoming versions of that.
I had to read several of these paragraphs multiple times because I kept skimming and not paying attention.
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