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Response To Nicholas Carr's Is Google Making USupid?

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In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Carr argues that the Internet is causing our reading skills to deteriorate. Conversely in Trent Batson’s article “Response to Nicholas Carr’s ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’”, Trent argues against Carr saying that the changes in our reading habits are actually positive. Both writers have valid points within their essays but Batson’s article makes more sense logically. Carr sees only the negative aspects of the Internet on people’s reading and not the positive ones. Technology is not making society stupid. Technology is causing us to research more efficiently and to work together as a society in the combined forums.
One way in which technology influences society is in how individuals research …show more content…

Today’s media is abbreviated compared to the media of previous generations. This is a direct result of the media’s audiences’ shift in reading from analyzing to browsing (Carr 240). Carr discusses his own reading habits saying, “It’s changing… I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy” (Carr 236). He is talking about his mind shifting from deep analytical reflection to quick bursts of thought. The human mind is changing as a result of technology, and even Batson agrees with Carr on this saying, “There is no question our habits are changing… The Web is different in almost all aspects from a book” (Batson 259). This change from deep contemplative thought to reading thousands of quick snippets does not have to be seen only as negative. While they agree on the change, Carr and Batson have different views on the ways in which this change affects …show more content…

“Carr sees only one side of the change...the loss of book habits. But, for us over thousands of years of learning, the book is the anomaly, not the Web” (Batson 259). Batson makes an excellent point, and books have only be widely spread during the most recent era of human society. For thousands of years oral tradition was the only way in which people learned. Carr even discusses in his own article how reading is not natural for humans. “Reading...is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is” (Carr 238). In this Carr is discussing the ways in which humans learn. The book is an “anomaly” in the fact that it cannot be changed easily, and is not fluid like human society (Batson 259). Batson discusses how books are credited to one or two authors, but the authors themselves have been shaped by the people around them,
The book led us to think that one person could write a permanent compilation of truth… that one person ‘owned’ the ideas in a book as though the author had grown up in isolation from all other humans and all the ideas had sprung, fully-formed, from his or her brain. (Batson

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Nicholas Carr is a writer who writes in these kind of field: technology, business, and culture. Carr wrote this essay called, “Is Google Making us Stupid”; Carr fully explains how internet changes people’s thinking, a way of reading, and knowledge with rhetoric strategies. For logos, Carr thoroughly supports his arguments with great supporting points from credit sources. He explains how the internet affects us in reading. For pathos, he points out that human’s brain would work differently since we are using the internet widely comparing to the generation, whom lives without the internet.

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But little did they know it would come so soon. In the article, Carr talks about how much he loses focus when reading a book and he relates this to the short memory span that he claims is caused by modern day technology being more entertaining. He goes on to say he cannot focus because he is used to blogs and movies instead of books. This is because of the fact that it is much easier and more to the point by using technology to find things that would normally take hours of research.

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By doing this the evidence from the other writers keeps the reader drawn in to show the effects the internet has on us. Carr says that the articles he gained information from said, “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense”; that the way we read now is what you would call ‘skimming’ or reading “horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins”. When reading on the internet, people have stopped reading entire articles, instead we bounce from site to site until we gather the information we need. Carr puts this information there so the reader can relate to it. In the article, he uses to support his argument, he agrees how people, lose attention rather rapidly when reading on the internet, and it is causing people to lose concentration when looking at physical readings.

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Simply concentrating has become hard to do. “The deep reading that used to come naturally has became a struggle.” (Carr 731) Carr feels as so his mind is being influenced by the technological advancements. Even as a writer he still struggles reading a book, because of the lack of concentration he now has.

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He supports this argument by citing a study conducted by students who have attended The University College London. The study proved to us that we no longer thoroughly read material, rather we just skim over most of what we read. From the convoluted works of the late 19th century, to the material of present day, the way we write and comprehend

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