For today’s class, you read the seventh chapter from Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Spend the first ten minutes of class writing your summary of the reading. What was his thesis or unity of thought in this chapter? How does his argument in this chapter relate to what he argues throughout the book?
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âThe net is best understood as the latest in a long series of tools that have helped mold the human mind.â The net does keep evolving over time which helped change the human mind. Does it change the mind for the better or the worse? This chapter explains that there isnât enough research to tell if it is a yes or no but, there are a lot of internal effects that will affect your way of thinking. When reading a book, you are in deep concentration because the book is a physical reading material. On the net, information is rushed and is thrown at you rapidly which cracks concentration and also, other elements of web distractions come into play for example, advertisements. Our brainâs plasticity allows us to learn information and rewire the brain according to the chapter. Also, it is our job to wire it. âDuring the course of a day, most of us with access to the web spend at least a couple of hours online… We tend to repeat the same or similar actions over and over again.â We find things fast on the net but, this lead us to lack the ability to do work ourselves.
As I was reading the Seventh chapter in Nicholas Carr non-fiction book, I caught on a few things. The Internet’s influence can only be judged when it is viewed in the fuller context of intellectual history. Nicholas Carr explains how it has been a long journey to figure out what is happening in his head, he figures that the Net has been shaping the human mind. Psychologists, neurobiologists, educators and web designers all had a conclusion on how being online promotes “cursory reading hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning”. I believe this to be true, being that as I am online, I feel like I am being hurried or I have to rush with what I am reading. I can easily get distracted when I am reading. I can easily get distracted when I am doing a research project for my class, I end up on a social media page or on Youtube, watching videos. Also I often forget my project and whenever I do remember it, I procrastinate. The net alters our mind resulting in sensory and cognitive stimuli, which is representative, intensive, and addictive. Carr starts to explain how we use how our fingers across the trackpad and tap the keyboards. “As we go through motions, the Net delivers a steady stream of inputs to our visual, somatosensory, and auditory cortices”, to me this tells readers that the Net is affecting our hearing, vision, balance, taste and smell. It can trigger our bodies to react to what see online, how we feel, what triggers us to want to eat certain things that are online and what we listen to in the media.
I have just read the seventh chapter from âThe Shallowsâ by Nicholas Carr. Here is the chapter summary:
The internet is still a new thing in the Human History. The Internet’s importance and influence can be judged only when it’s viewed in the full context. Which we are working on right now. As revolutionary as the internet may be appear , the internet is best understood as the latest in a long series of tools that have helped molding the human mind.
What can science tell us about the actual effects of internet in the way our minds works? Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators, and Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Itâs possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just as itâs possible to thinks shallowly while reading a book, but thatâs not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards. One thing is very clear, if it goes on like the way we are using internet it would probably end up redesigning our brain that looks and works a lot like the Internet!
In chapter seven of the shallows it explains the effects of internet use on the brain in depth. Humans are growing up with the internet just about every where in their lives. In our homes, cars, public transportation, jobs and schools. If too much of something effects us, isnât there something like too much internet? A effect that is said in the book is cognitive overload. This is when you receive too much information at once, this is manly caused by distractions and can effect your connection skills to different pieces of information, it can also effect your thought process. Another effect of the internet is memory, we humans have a short term memory and a long term memory. Short term memory turns into long term. After we learn information from the internet the we quickly move on to another piece of information making us un able to turn short term information to long term.
The Jugglerâs Brain discuss the topics mainly on distractions and the types of memory we have. Distractions happen as Carr sees it, our attention only to scatter it.â He also thinks that distractions arenât all that bad. Carr feels if we focus enough, it can causes to get stuck in a mental rut.â So because of this, Carr believes if we leave a situation alone for a while, then come back we could have more ideas to fix the problem. Memory is talked about in two different sections: Short and Long term memory. Short term is also known as working memory as well which is also talked about in Brain Rules by John Medina.
According to Chapter Seven in the book The Shallows written by Nicholas Carr, explains that there are very limited resources such as books,magazine, and newspaper which are very more dependent than websites. Nicholas Carr will always remind his readers the technology around us is evolving faster than we normally expected. He also describes the net today and it’s way of designing ,and shaping our minds. Humans can mentally and physically keep up with the new advanced technology being distributed now.
In the chapter “The Juggler’s Brain” of the book “The Shallow” by Nicolas Carr, Car emphasizes on the benefits of Internet and how addicted it is. Carr states that “Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information ,expressing ourselves, and conversing with others”. This caught my attention because this shows that the Internet is helping us in ways that no other tools could. Internet is the only tool which has changed our way of thinking. Internet gives us instant access to a lot of information which helps us gain knowledge and saves us time. Carr once said, “it also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment”. The net is extremely addictive. People uses net at least few hours a day wether they need it or not. People uses it for different purposes some uses it for entertainment, some for communication, and others for works. The net is like “double edge sword” it has positive and negative sides it can help a person stay aware of things, and it can make a person lazier by giving almost all the answers someone needs. In the digression Carr states that,”how can people get more intelligent and have no larger vocabularies, no larger stores of general information, no greater ability to solve arithmetical problems?”. Carr claims that our IQ might be going up but our general intelligence is going down.
In chapter 7 Nicholas Carr deeply explained about how internet effect our braina sn the way we think. Nicholas Carr stated that internet evolvong by the and with the internet our thinking of our brain is also changing because most people spend their most of time on onternet because of work or entertainment. In past humans had books to read which requires focus and it was easy to retrieve information and memorize it for long time but internet have small pieces of information that is complex and you cant understand the context like you can do from the books. The people are losing their focus because of the use of internet in their daily routine.
In chapter 7 of “The Shallows”, Nicholas Carr explains the net’s influence and impact that it is having on the past few generations and the generations to come. An example of the influence it has is, that instead of people picking up a newspaper, magazine, or article, we would instead pick up our phones and go online and search that same newspaper,magazine, or article and it would come up for free in no less than a minute. There is no point of getting out of our way to go to the library, when we can surf the net at an amazing speed to get what we want, and the newer generations are learning that more than us. Talk about influence, the internet is still a new thing, and it will only get broader and wider with its information, as many people support it.
Today we are here to discuss chapter seven of Nicholas Carr’s famous book title “The Shallows”. To start off, this is a chapter about uncertainty regarding the Internet. One can view the Internet as a tool or source that has caused a significant changed in our human minds. This is quite true, the point in the chapter however is that there is no proper explanation, rather, not enough information to identify the internet as a good or bad influence on our minds. There are differing factors in between the Internet and physical objects such as magazines. In a magazine you’re easily more concentrated when reading it because you physically have it in your hands, it attracts your attention with its colorful words, its not very often mature writing style, its impressive pictures. When you apply this to reading the same magazine except on the Internet, you can expect significant amount of time to be wasted while reading it. You can read the magazine in the same amount of time whether it is on the Internet or it’s physically in your hand, but the difference between them is your attention span. You can easily trail off from the magazine and go watch a video on YouTube as opposed to a physical version where you’re less likely to be distracted. The things we find on the Internet can be very distracting and in turn cause us to be lazy and ignore the actual assignment we had been planning to perform.
In chapter seven, carr talked about the advantages and disadvantages of using the web but mainly the disadvantage.He also spoke about how the internet is developing faster than we might think ,which is true.He continue his argument about how the internet a distraction.He also said instead of spending time multi-tasking a lot of irrelevant data we are discouraging our brain and challenging them with original lines of thought.
In this chapter, Nicholas Carr goes over the efficiency of the internet and the effects it has on our way of thinking and reasoning. Carr states, âThe Net grants us instant access to a library of information unprecedented in its size and scope, and makes it easy for us to sort through the library – to find if not exactly what weâre looking for, at least something sufficient for for our immediate purposes. What it diminishes is to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections to give rise to a singular intelligenceâ (Carr, Par. 3). In other words, while searching for things through the internet can be beneficial and instant for us, it also takes away our natural ability to know and learn things accurately for ourselves.
In chapter seven of âThe Shallowsâ Nicholas Carr discusses how the the web is distracting us and how we may spend useless hours repeating the same actions more than once. He states, â During the course of a day, most of us with access to the web spend at least a couple of hours online — sometimes much more — and during that time, we tend to repeat the same or similar actions over and over againâ.(116) Later in the chapter he also introduces the idea of ârich mediaâ how hypermedia would provide a richer learning experience for readers, he continues on to say the â the division of attention demanded by multimedia further strains our cognitive abilitiesâ.(129) Carr wants us to be aware of how distracting and the disadvantages of the web.
In chapter seven of “The Shallows”, Carr tells us that the internet is the latest in a long line of tools that has helped mold the human mind. As we spend more time using the internet and less time gathering information in traditional ways, our brains adapt to this and begin to reject the traditional ways. This is why a person who spends a lot of time on the internet may have trouble focusing on a book, because their mind is accustomed to receiving information rapidly and without much filler, whereas books are composed of well thought out sentences and many details. On top of this, the internet itself is very distracting and taxing on the mind that is using it. because of its nature of hyperlinks and multitasking, it encourages the user to try to shift their attention rapidly, which in and of itself exhausts the mind every time.
In chapter seven of âThe Shallowsâ Nicholas Carr explains how the web is distracting us and how it’s affecting us. The Internetâs influence can only be judged when it is viewed in the fuller context of intellectual history. Nicholas Carr figures that the Net has been shaping the human mind. Scientist say that the internet promotes cursory reading hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning. Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions. The net engages all of our senses except, so far, those of smell and taste and it engages them simultaneously. Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.
In chapter seven of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, Carr describes advantages and disadvantages of getting information online. First Carr speaks about readiing a hypertexted document and how it reduces overrall comprehension. Following the links takes the part of the brains attention away from deeper comprehension and making connections. Next Carr speaks about competing media and how they do not enhance the deepness with which something is learned. He also says how pictures and sound together may be one exception to not using mixed media. And lastly he speaks about how peopple dont read anymore they just skim through large amounts of context.