Cisco Alers
As we continue to experience new things our brains have the ability to change in order to learn from those new things quick enough to react to them a second time. This ability to change is programmed in all of us deep inside our genes. My topic is the effect that the internet has on our ability to learn, in other words how has the introduction to internet effect the way us humans learn new things. The Internet changes the way we educate ourselves because it gives us a convenient way of gaining information. Most of the new information we are learning today is short and straight to point, and it changes the environment of where we gain experience and intelligence. This means that some day in the far future humans will continue learning through technological devices (as we’re doing today) if we continue educating ourselves in classrooms, rather than where we naturally came from, the outside world.
In our world today we have gone from not having the wheel to making vehicles that can break earth’s atmosphere in a few seconds and then traveling millions of miles away from earth this shows the quick advancement in our technologies and our brains have barely evolved since the Inhabitant of the first civilization, this shows how much humans are able to learn and change in such a short period of time. The human brain control capacity has not changed much from over five thousand years ago, so how is it possible for us to advance in technology so quickly? Part of the reason being is the amount of convince of internet we have placed on this world. The more convenient the internet is to us the faster we can accomplish things that would usually take us an hour or two to complete leaving us more time to focus on other things. For example, Ms. Guzman states that the internet has made “paying bills a lot easier” (Ms. Guzman par 1), she has the convenient internet on her person which can give her the ability to make quick payments. Another example of the internet having lots of convince would be a statement from Ms. Diaz “google helps me answer questions quickly whenever I need them (Diaz par 4). Ms. Diaz has become used to using google as a source of information because it’s a very convenient and available way to learn new things.
In addition to the convenience of the internet, it also an abundance amount of information that is short and straight to the point. This changes our way we obtain new information which can also change the way we act towards information that is larger then just a few paragraphs as said in the shallows “the internet may have made a less patient reader”(Carr page 8). This shows how something like the internet can drastically change the way our brains work. This can make a great change in our lives by shortening our attention span which can effect how we act in class rooms that have long dragged out lectures, also in jobs that require reading long pieces of information. The out come by giving us quick information, we can get other answers from different points of view and get a generalized conclusion to our findings. The other out come to the conclusions that we find can lack in specificity meaning that we can get a conclusion to our findings, but It would only be close to the right answer and the right answer would most likely come from doing the finding yourself. This is difficult for us humans because if we don’t like to do something we find the easiest way to and that is searching up our answers on the internet.
The way we learn things can also be effected by the environment we learn in. Our learning environment was originally the outside world and once we started making the classroom the one thing that boxed us off from the outside world it decreased our ability to learn. This is a reason why kids say that school is so boring most of the time because their attention towards the information and ability to absorb that information has decreased. Over time our brains can change in order to gain information in a classroom easier, but this is only greatly effected if a person constantly is learning while they are boxed off from the outside world. Which could be a reason why some athletes are less attentive in class then a person that spends their time in their studies. With the internet our new learning environment can be both everywhere and at one place. With everywhere meaning in our classrooms, jobs, parks and places that a person normally goes and in one place meaning that the one thing that you’re focused on is the screen that you are looking at for the information. According to the wall street journal “nearly 75% of the US population, or 204.3 million people, have access to the Internet from home”(Wall street journal par1). These statistics were given over ten years ago now our learning environment is just about everywhere there is internet.
The negative impact on the internet being everywhere in our lives is that when we gain fast information we are able to do multiple things at once. This can cause distractions making us unable to absorb the information we are focusing on. “have limited ability to process incoming information” This means that the internet is also effecting us in a way that our conclusions can lack in connection with all the information gathered. This can also effected our short term and our long term memory, because the distractions that the internet gives is making us unable to turn our short term memory in to long term memory.
In conclusion, our brains can be effected by many things including the Internet. Maybe one day in the future we could find a way for the internet to be less of a distraction. One day there could be a software that only lets you open up a few specific things at a curtain period of time of the day, which could help you with focus. One thing that probably won’t decrease is the convince that the internet has, but the other things like environment can change by simply gaining your information in a different place that you feel comfortable in. Something you can do to manage with these effects is change your life style with the changing world. Instead of struggling from switching back and forth from short summaries to two hundred fifty page books stay with the short summaries, it would be less of a struggle on your brain. The world we know today is not staying the same it is changing and I feel its better to change with it rather then to fight against it.

Works Cited
– Dey, Eric, Helen Burn, and David Gerdes. “Bringing The Classroom To The Web: Effects Of Using New Technologies To Capture And Deliver Lectures.” Research In Higher Education 50.4 (2009): 377-393. Academic Search Complete. Web. 7 Dec. 2015.
– Wall Street Journal. “Home Access to Web Rises to nearly 75% in U.S.” Wall Street Journal 18 March. 2004. Section B: Page 5, Column 5. Lexis Nexis. Web. 18 March. 2015
– Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. 2011. Print.
– Guzman, Vanessa. Personal interview. 20 Nov 2015.
– Diaz, Daisha. Personal interview. 20 Nov 2015.