The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains By Nicholas Carr

The internet has been, arguably, the most influential form of technology to be introduced in the past hundred years. With this creation, the world as we know it has been connected in ways that were never dreamed of before. Peoples from thousands of miles away are able to converse and spread their ideas with a simple push of a button. Cultures have interacted like never before. This, in return, has caused a new information age that has enlightened the world as we start the 21st century. However, this new information age has come with a price. In the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr, the author discusses how the internet is causing a change in the way people read and see things. He also mentions how

He uses examples from his own experience with the change that had came with his long-term computer usage. These changes would develop fear in the average reader. Carr states in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, “My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative of turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose thread, and begin looking for something else to do.”(Carr, p. 5) This phrase causes a sense of fear within the average reader. What the internet is doing to our brain is like something from a horror movie; when an aberration begins to possess the main character and slowly changing him or her. This phrase also encourages a sense of familiarity with the author. This negatively affects our thought process after continuous computer usage. Carr goes on to elaborating on another case to work with our sense of emotions. He states, “We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated” (Carr p.133). This quote explains how humans have a natural sense of the need to be connected and that most people does not like the fear isolation, thus the phrase appeals to another