Technology In Moderation By Nicholas Carr Sherry Turkle

Technology in Moderation Milk is good for you, but having too much is unhealthy. Technology, like milk and anything else, is unhealthy in excess. Think of it like drinking a gallon of milk at one time. The human body will reject the excess milk and will attempt to eject the milk out of its system. Similarly, technology is being excessively used in the wrong ways, and its usage is being criticized by the well educated people of society; which, to me, means society is verbally rejecting technology. Although technology is a “series of tools that have helped mold the human mind”, it has done so substantially more than what is desirable(Carr 115). Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle, and I all agree that technology isn’t the real problem; it’s how technology

The excessive misuse of technology can be seen everywhere in the modern society. It has even worked its way into college and university classrooms. Sherry Turkle notices that her “students are on Facebook and Youtube, and they are shopping, mostly for music” while in class(Turkle 163). Instead of using their technology (namely their laptops and smartphones) as a resource to clarify difficult concepts, the students are using it as a distraction from the class. Even though these distractions are enjoyable, they show how technology has negatively affected how actively engaged students are in a classroom. I would add how this concept can then be translated to many other scenarios. Technology is causing people in the modern society to not actively engaged in everyday tasks. In addition to just distracting us, “every time we shift our attention, our brain has to reorient itself”(Carr 133). People are seen using technology as a distraction anywhere and everywhere, wasting time rather than using it as a helpful resource; which is considered misusing technology. Carr indicates that technology is making us waste time, but he could’ve portrayed it better by showing how much time is wasted through

The current use of social media would be “useful if [it] is sparse communication with the people we care about”(Turkle 160). The connectivity to loved ones that social media has brought makes it easier to know what the important people in our lives are doing. Sadly, it is also being used to see what almost-strangers are doing as well. Social media, although it has a positive purpose, is being misused to consume time, time that could’ve been better spent doing something else. Other forms of technology have made gathering information easier and more efficient. Carr explains how, “with the Net, we face many information faucets” in which we can reach in and pull out the information we need, but there is too much information available at once(Carr 125). This could’ve been better explained by talking more in depth about how people are gathering information, via search engines, the wrong way. Gathering information in this manner takes away the process of deeply thinking about the information obtained. Since an answer can be arrived at without deep thinking, individuals prefer not to deeply engage in topics and come up with meaningful thoughts on their own. Thanks to technology, our “neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are expanding and strengthening”(Carr 141). Individuals are becoming better at finding specific things in a