For today’s class, we delved deeper into Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and read the third chapter. Before we discuss the reading, spend ten minutes to write a summary of your reading in your notebooks. Type up your summary later, and post it here as a comment to this blog post.
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Chapter Three Tools of The Mind gives readers an inside scoop on how the mind is trained from when your a little child an adult. Our intellectual maturation as individuals are traced through the way we draw pictures, or maps of our surroundings. We see things as features around us and then advance to even ore accurate and more abstract representation of our environment whether it’ll be geographic or topographic space. Virga describes how children’s drawing of maps advance, perceptions and representational abilities are not matched; only the simplest topographical relationships are presented, without regard for perspective or distances”. Technology is an expression of human will, which we seek to expand our power and control over our circumstances. Technology is so intent on solving a particular problem or untangling some scientific or engineering dilemma that you don’t see the broader implications of the work. This shows that technology is a necessity to society.
Our brains have plasticity, but that doesnât mean that we change our genetics as much as we change how our brain works throughout our lives. Thatâs where we have our technology to change our lives and make it easier for us to live, learn and do things. Technology is the result of our neural plasticity we change our brains based off of experience and we think after a while, cant we make this easier? For example our first time we had wrought down something is probably the most important peace of technology that humans have invented. With written words and symbols we could write down information for future humans to learn from, as well as create better technology with the information learned from the past humans. For example, rather then finding something can cure cancer in an old lab that was lost from society, we can find both that something and the lab report on how it was made and waste less time.
Within chapter 3 of “The Shallows” it speaks about how no matter what as we grow, The brain will grow and continue to change and evolve as you grow out through life. Technology however in this life as Carr explained in the chapter are intellectual. Clock’s and maps and writing has evolved throughout the years. Back in the 20th century there weren’t any cell phones to tell the time or any technology to tell you how to get somewhere (GPS) or any keyboard or tablet that you use to write. Carr calls those 3 things to be supplements to our daily lives. He is correct I think as well. I say this because all of these things are things that change our way of thinking. It evolves the brain because years ago as said before all those things were separated and weren’t so evolved and technology in the now has brought all 3 of those things together into one which is huge. He also says that “we adapt ourselves to our tools” which I believe to be true also.
I have just read a chapter called ” Tools of The Mind” from Nicholas Carrâs “The Shallows ” and here is the main points: At first Nicholas Carr talks about map. Our intellectual maturation as individuals can be traced through the way we draw pictures or maps of our surroundings. We begin with primitive, literal renderings of the features of the land that we see around us, and we only advance in time by being more abstract and be able to represent geographic and topographic space. According to Nicholas Carr The map is a medium that not only stores and transmits information but also embodies a particular mode of seeing and thinking.
After that Nicholas Carr talks about Time. The mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves. The clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration. The clock played a crucial role in propelling us out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment.
Every technology is an expression of human will. It is our intellectual technologies that have the greatest and most lasting power over what and how we think. They are our most intimate tools, the ones we use for self-expression, for shaping personal and public identity, and for cultivating relations with others.
Also in Platoâs time, and for centuries afterward we started focusing on writing as a mean of storing information.
Tools of the mid starts off with an example of a child learning maturation which Nicholas Carr starts describing as the âfeatures of the land we see around us.âThis means our surroundings affect the progress of growing. Usually this starts when we are infants then we evolve to realism which can help create a realistic visual in our minds. Throughout time, drawings developed and âbecame scientific in both its precision and its abstraction.â The change of mechanical clocks started to advance being able to fit a good size clock into rooms in people’s houses as well as being carried around. Due to this, it changed the way people thought. Many of the tools we have are becoming more influential on our thoughts and perspective. Both determinalist and instrumentalists agree that technology created a turning point in history. Carr explains how mankind uses tools which help support or extend his nervous system. Meaning technology has influenced how we find, store and clarify information. Language improvement has been influenced by intellectual technologies by helping find either a simple or complex way of diction.
According to Chapter 3 called âTools of The Mindâ in the book âThe Shallowsâ written by Nicholas Carr itâs mainly about timing, mapping and also writing. All of these three main subjects have changed from year to year. With in technology all of these things have made a big impact. For example instead of using maps now we use gps to get around faster. Instead of having a watch on your wrist then, we now have devices to quickly tell us. Instead of paper and pen used to commutate with symbols for writing we have phones,tablets, and computers. All of these new things in the 20th/21th century have been controlling us. We now often are very dependent on technology to fix are problems.Humans are so attached to technology now.
Rahat Ahmed
Professor Ellis
English 1101
11/22/15
The Shallows
In this particular chapter of âThe Shallowsâ Nicholas Carr mainly discusses the evolution of certain technologies and the role of these advancements in relation to the shaping of civilization. Nicholas Carr talks about how the invention of a clock has changed our perception of time drastically. The concept of keeping time is fascinating to me, because until recently I never thought to question it. Can you imagine what it was like to live before time dictated our schedules? Honestly I would freak out every time I woke up in the middle of the night to find out that its only 8 pm. According to Nicholas Carr â Every technology is an expression of human will. Through our tools, we seek to expand our power and control over our circumstances, over nature, over time and distance, over one another. Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind should workâ. I completely agree with Nicholas Carr mainly because of how accurate he is on this particular topic.
In the chapter âTools of the Mindâ of the book The Shallow by Nicolas Carr, CArr emphasized on how tools can affect our mind. According to Carr, âEvery Technology is an expression of human willâ. This caught my interest because it shows that every technology that we use develope human thoughts. As human grows up the brain intends to pay more attention to details of things rather than the general idea like kids. People are becoming more and more dependent on technology such as gps. People used to use maps before but now they use GPS in order to save time and itâs way more easier. The modern technology have both positive and negative sides. It can help us save time and do more things in short times than we can without these technologies. The negative side is that people are getting lazier and lazier, people nowadays expect to get answers from computers without putting any afford on finding an answer.
In chapter 3 Nicholas Carr mainly explained about how out brain grows throughout life and how our surroundings and circumstances affect our brain. Throughout human history humans and technology evolved. Just as our brain changed the society also changed. Our brain changes from our surroundings and circumstances in our lives. In old times there was no modern technology that we have in present age. The people in old times had really few medians to communicate with each other and to survive. When the time passes humanâs brain began to evolve and invent new things that were better than before and through these invention peopleâs lives began to get easier and technology became part of their life.
The third chapter is titled âTools of the Mindâ. In the beginning of the chapter, Nicholas Carr starts us off with a sort of story. To summarize the story, it talks about a child, a little girl who was possibly at an infant age, grabbing a crayon from a box and scribbling simplistic drawings that symbolize certain things. In the story those simple objects were a yellow circle that signified a sun, a green squiggle around the middle of the page to represent a horizon, two brown lines that come together to form a mountain and a black rectangle with a red triangle at the top to signify her house. And from there as she grows up her drawings continue to improve and become more precise and detailed. Essentially, Carr is stating that as human’s grow, so too does their intellect.
In âThe Shallowsâ by Nicholas Carr, chapter three discusses how technology has impacted humans. He goes on to speak about the clock(42-43) and how that has changed humans, he states, âthe mechanical clock changed the way we saw ourselves … it changed the way we thoughtâ. I believe what he means by this is with the influence of certain technology introduced to society it has not only benefited society but has changed them without realization. He also says an interesting quote which i’m not to sure what he is trying to convey, he states, âThe history of language is also a history of the mindâ.(51) Overall the chapter was a little difficult to understand and i was seeing myself go back and reading certain paragraphs twice.
Chapter 3 speaks about the progress of children mind into today through the use of one quote, âStages of development of our map making skills closely parallel the general stages of childhood cognitive development.â This chapter also focuses on the human mind and the creation of maps/units advancements. It also states that, âmaps advanced the evolution of abstract thinking.â With the help of technologies, we can gain power of knowledge and basically control over almost anything. The next section of the chapter goes into detail about how our technologies can be divided roughly into four categories. One set deals with physical strength (the plow etc.); the Second set focus on the range of sensitivity of our senses (microscope etc.), the Third deals with nature and our needs (Birth Control etc.), and last is the âIntellectual Technologiesâ which deals with maps and clocks. Overall, these technologies had cognitive benefits.
Chapter 3 is about how technology over time transformed into something more accessable and easier for us to use. The technology we have now is more advanced than what is was before, and apparently the more advanced our technology is, the smarter our future generations will be. This chapter is about timing, mapping, and writing. These days, we have the time on our wrists, maps on our phones, and writing is done on our computers, rather than hand written. Or you can even say we have all these on one device, our phones. Also, we dont have to send letter to far away relatives or friends anymore to communicate. We can just send a text message which is sent in no less than two seconds at times, or even skype them.
Nicholas Carr started chapter three” tools of the mind” like always with a story. This one was about a little kid who had crayon a started to draw images to represent her surroundings.The main focus of this chapter was time maps and also writing.Technology has made everything easier for us, everything is right at our fingertips. Therefore We use our brain less, I understand why Carr argue the t the internet is making us stupid.
In the third chapter of “The Shallows”, Nicholas Carr tells us that although the human body may eventually stop growing, our brains never do. As we grow older and gain experience, our brain physically changes and creates new neuron “links” within the brain to store this information. As a result, our brain, and its wiring, is continually becoming more and more complex. As a side effect to this, our brains are perpetually susceptible to being changed by new technology we may come across. The clock was used as an example of this, because the clock was an invention that changed the way people live their lives today. Carr argues that every technological invention has an intellectual ethic, and is an extension of the human mind in that it was only created to fill a need that the human mind saw for itself. The two major sides in this debate re the technological determinists, who feel that technology has played and will play a major role in the course of human mental development, and the technological instrumentalists, who feel simply that technology is technology and has no effect on the way our brain develops, it is simply a means of communication, navigation, etc.
The more frequently and intensively people used maps, the more their minds came to understand reality in the map’s terms. Arthur Robinson explains that “the combination of the reduction of reality and the construct of an analogical space is an attainment in abstract thinking of a very high order indeed.” The technology of the maps gave to man a new and more comprehending mind, better able to understand the unseen forces that shapes his surrounding and his existence. The changes of middle ages led to people to demand a more precise measurement of time. The need for tighter scheduling and synchronization of work, transport, devotion and even leisure provided the impetus for rapid progress in clock technology. Nicholas says that clocks did become more accurate and ornate by they got smaller and cheaper. It changed the way people worked, shopped, played and behaved. Nicholas also states which I found interesting that the intellectual ethic of a technology is rarely recognized by its inventors. They are usually so intent on solving a particular problem of untangling some scientific or engineering dilemma.
In chapter three of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, Carr goes into how the map, the clock, and writing are “intellectual technologies” that changed society and our ways of thinking and processing information. He tries to show the reader how the internet is doing the same thing. He spekas about the four types of technology and then connects it to the brain. Carr starts off the chapter with a short story. The short story being about a little girl that begins to draw a picture. And in the picture she begins to draw simplistics common things that any one person should know. She grabs the yellow crayon and begins to draw and color in a yellow circle representing the sun and continues with the green scribbles on the bottom that would be the grass. As this little girl grows she continues to work on her drawing and she also gets better and more detailed at her work. Her drawings getting better and better also have to do with the brain. So to sum up what Carr was trying to say with this short story, as humans grow and begin to age so does the brain and the intellect within the brain also begins to expand and grow.
Chapter 3 of the Shallows by Nicholas Carr, Carr connects how different inventions such as the map and the clock changed society in its time and the Internet will do the same in this generation. The Internet will be a big part of future generations.