Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? is a great overview of the impact the Internet is having on his (and others); life, habits, and possibly even the brain. The old days of having to spend hours researching a subject are long gone because of the Internet. Having such a powerful tool available at any time can be a good thing and a bad thing wrapped up in the same package. Home computer and smartphone ownership have been on a steady rise over the last couple decades, with most homes now having multiple devices. Therefore, having information available at all times has become a reality.
This essay is informative because it shows how habits, and the mind, are changing because of the Internet. People have become so dependent on instant information:
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Like learning basic math facts without a calculator, cognitive learning requires repeating information over and over again in order to be retained. A few decades ago, research required repetitiveness to fully comprehend a subject because retrieving the information for a second time was just as much of a task as the initial research. When information can be easily retrieved, people tend to spend less time trying to understand the information. It will enter the working memory only to be lost as more information is acquired because it no longer needs to be retained in the brain, it is retained in the history of the search engine (Myers …show more content…
It can be traced all the way back to Socrates, who was concerned about what writing would do to society’s thought process. Plato quotes Socrates, “For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those that learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.” (Mills 386). Writing did not turn out to be the destruction of the mind the way Socrates thought it would be. Society depends on reading and writing in every aspect of life now. The Internet has yet to prove that it will be the necessity that reading and writing are, but with every advancement in technology, society is getting closer to thinking it is a necessity. “Life has become more complex, but we hardly ever notice it because technology has made complexity simpler than ever” (Chamorro-Premuzic). It used to take five to ten minutes to find a single answer; now five to ten answers can be found in a single