Alexis M. DeSantis, Professor, Wiley 24FA-FYSE-100-20 8, October 2024. How Carr uses Persuasive Techniques to his Advantage: The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains In this essay I will speak about how Nicholas Carr does a fantastic job at using persuasive techniques to get us to try and understand his ideas about the internet’s effects on our brains. Using persuasive techniques like logical appeals (logos), emotional appeals (pathos), rhetorical questions, and so many more to get us thinking the way he is thinking. And better to get us to agree with the way he thinks. This book is about Carr and his ideas about the digital age and how it changes our thoughts and brain patterns, in good and bad ways. The chapter we will be touching …show more content…
To find some examples of rhetorical questions, I jumped into some other chapters. The quote, “Does optimizing for multitasking result in better functioning – that is, creativity, inventiveness, productiveness” he uses this question to get his audience excited and thinking, most of the time he follows it with what he answers. “The answer is, in more cases than not, no,” says Grafman. “The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become, he argues more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.” He continues it on with the answer to help the readers discover what they might not have been thinking. I think it’s important to consider the answers you might have in your brain and the answers he has found in order to get the reader digging deeper into the whys of his rhetorical …show more content…
No matter if the story is real or fake, it engages the reader. In storytelling he uses ethos, pathos, and logos. Nicholas Carr uses a lot of storytelling in this book, telling the different stories of different types of people and what the experience is with technology is in the real world, and the development of technology. Not only does storytelling entertain us readers, but it helps us understand where technology started. In this example he talks about the development of maps, and how it changes the way a brain works, Knowing what we do about London cabbies, we can posit that as people became more dependent on maps, rather than their own memories, by navigating their surroundings, they almost certainly experienced both anatomical and functional changes in the hippocampus and other brain areas involved in spatial modeling and memory. The circuitry devoted to maintaining representations of space likely shrank, while areas employed deciphering complex and abstract visual information likely expanded or strengthened. We also now know that the changes in the brain spurred by map use could be deployed for other purposes, which helps explain how abstract thinking in general could be promoted by the spread of the cartographer’s craft. This is a good example of storytelling because