Digital Reading Comparison Essay

Is Google Making Us Stupid? Throughout Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he goes over what he believes the internet is doing to our brains, and why it may be bad. To begin, Carr describes that he himself had felt that something in his brain was changing. He felt a significant change is his thinking, reasoning, and concentration skills, especially when it came to reading.

Rhetorical Analysis In the article “Is Google Making us Stupid?”, author Nicholas Carr expresses his idea that the internet is taking over society and our thinking process. Google is affecting our abilities to read books, longer articles, and even older writings. Carr believes that we have become so accustomed to the ways of the internet, and we are relying on Google 's ability to sort through the details for us so we don 't have to, in order to get the information we find necessary more efficiently. He finds that this process has become almost too handy, and that it is corrupting us from becoming better educated.

In his essay Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr argues that our dependence on the Internet changes the way we read and think. He includes his own personal testimony to support this claim, as well as others’ descriptions, including several friends, and bloggers that Carr quote. While he lacks scientific proof supporting his claim, multiple testimonies support his claim that the internet has changed the way people think. However, Carr views this negatively, saying that “I’m not thinking the way I used to think… my concentration often starts to drift… I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text” (633-634).

The article “Why Don’t Teens Read For Pleasure Like They Use To?” by Jennifer Ludden, writes about teens not reading as much and why aren’t they reading. Ludden uses logos and people to show the drop-off reading among teens. The author utilize people and data to support the drop-off in reading amidst teens.

With just one fingertip, they are opened to the access to any information sources they need. However, as he throws his question, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” , Carr suggests that this efficiency and immediacy make people lose their critical thinking skills and their proficiency at reading and

Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr and How Computers Change the Way We Think by Sherry Turkle both explore the effects of technology, or more specifically the effects of the internet in society and individual thought. Carr suggests that computers and other forms of technology are becoming of greater value than humans. He believes that humans are losing their natural instincts while everything and everybody are being measured up to the speed and vast knowledge of Google. Although Turkle agrees with many of Carr’s beliefs, Turkle focuses more on the aspect of how society is evolving with technology. She views the internet as a medium that carries new ideas, thoughts, and ways of self-expression.

In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr writes about how he has a challenging time reading books that after a few pages he loses concentration and that his mind wanders to other things. The reading that use to come natural to him no longer does and he believes the internet is to blame, what once took a few hours searching through multiple books in the library for information now can be found in a few minutes searched on the internet. He also mentions other bloggers that confess how they either no longer read books or do not read articles that are longer than a few paragraphs or that they just skim articles on the internet. Carr lists many posts from other people also from different years some going back to the 1980s.

With just a few keystrokes and a press of the enter key, Google connects users to the information they’re looking for. Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” explores the phenomenon that people will skim through articles and leave from one site to another. In addition, adds in anecdotes of some of history's greatest inventions and how they similarly relate to the Web. Although the Internet has transformed the way we receive and send information, I feel as if the responsibilities of reading are simply left to us to find out because we take the information for granted. “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, is a 2008 article that delves into the strange finding that people seem to skip through articles without actually understanding the

Brainless.com: Rhetorical Strategies in Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Do we depend on the Internet to answer all of our questions? Nicholas Carr, an American author, wrote “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” published in 2008 in The Atlantic, and he argues about the effects of the Internet on literacy, cognition, and culture. Carr begins his argument with the ending scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

When Carr discusses how the internet has affected people close to him he discusses their experiences by saying, “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing”. This phenomenon is quite evident in "Fahrenheit 451" with Mildred, the programing she views has reduced her attention span to nearly nonexistent as she doesn’t fully comprehend what Montag says in their discussions. A con of the internet would have to be the fact that information is readily available, it allows us to consume lots of information in a shorter amount of time. In the past information took time to find and was mostly found in written books, "Fahrenheit 451" is a society in which this concept has been brought to an extreme. Print literature/any form of physical writing is extremely important according to Maryanne Wolf, an author referenced in the article, “The media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains”.

With the excess of technology narrated in both histories, people began to lose more and more their interpretation capabilities. With reading, people are always encouraged to interpret situations and conversations, but with all the attention now be given to the technologies started to not be so necessary to have this ability to interpretation. Another factor that eliminates the need for interpretation is that these technologies are used a lot just as a distraction and people do not really know what they are watching. An example of this is seen in the history Fahrenheit 451, in the following conversation between Montag and his wife about the programs she watched on television " ‘I had a nice evening,’ she said, in the bathroom. ‘What doing?’

The Influence of Technology In the essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr argues that utilization of the internet has an adverse effect on our way of thinking and functioning in everyday life. Whether it be reading a newspaper, or scrolling through Facebook, internet media has forever stamped its name in our existence. Carr explains to us that the internet is a tool used every single day in today’s society, but also makes most of us complacent with the ease of having the world at our fingertips.

As the digital age comes upon us, more and more Americans become dissatisfied with the state of literacy in this generation. Because the Internet paves the way for shorter and shorter interactions, namely articles versus novels and six-second viral videos versus films, many people that grew up in the age of the Internet have a preference for this condensed form of entertainment. Dana Gioia of The New York Times asserts in his essay “Why Literature Matters” that the decline of reading in America is destined to have a negative impact on society as a whole. Gioia opens his essay with a bittersweet account of which trend is occurring in the twenty-first century America arts scene. He notes that as college attendance rates blossom, the interest

Nowadays, the internet is the biggest marketing and media tool that people can use today. It can have various effects on people’s daily life ranging from bad to beneficial. In the essay “Is Google making us stupid” by Nicholas Carr writes about how internet usage in the 21st century is changing people’s reading habit and a cognitive concentration. Particularly, he emphasizes on Google’s role in this matter and its consequences on making people machine like. Carr also stated that the online reading largely contributes to people’s way of reading a book.

Everyone knows that reading is important, but have you ever asked yourself why is that so? Reading is one of the most beneficial and practical activities that a human being can do. Unfortunately it is a disappointment that people these days read less. As we know, books were the main source of entertainment centuries ago, but with the widespread of technological advances such as the cinema, television, internet, among others, many people left their books on the bookshelf. The purpose of this speech is to present the benefits and the importance of reading.