After reading CARR’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” , I realized the powerful of the affect by internet is huge than I think. In the reading, the most surprise point to me is internet have the power to change people’s way of thinking. It mentions “…as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”. It means as people keep rely on computers, one day we will lost our ability of other things because we are using computer for everything. Example like the abilities of reading and to think deeply. However, one day the people who use computer all the time can’t will lost those things because the computer have change them.

In “Is  Google making us stupid” author Nicholas Carr describes how the internet makes us lazy. I personally agree with this. The internet keeps growing slowly and it shows that people depend on the internet very often. When people use the internet a lot it starts to see the pattern in which you things. For example when you shop online or even watch YouTube. It shows you a recommended for you column or for shopping things you might like. This surprised me because I am on the internet very often and it knows what i buy or what i like to read and watch on YouTube. It also puts a sense of forgetfulness in your mind because the computer or device that your using is thinking for you and helps you get distracted real easily. Furthermore the internet makes you read faster than going into depth reading. For example when your reading a book you tend to read and fully understand it as for the internet if your on it reading an article you tend to skim it rather than full reading it figuring out some part of what is going on. The internet is everywhere making people rely on it too much, they make keep your eyes on your phone half of the day is a big part of the world. The more technology advances the more people will use it. People get more lazy when technology advances it thinks for them and also gives them less time on their hands.

In the article “Does the Internet Make you Smarter?,” author Clay Shirkey provides us with a different point of view about modern day internet use. According to Shirkey, there are “1.8 Billion current internet users”, however is it almost impossible to make nearly 1.8 billion people stupid. As of 2016, there are 7.5 billion people on Earth, therefore  making 1.8 billion people “stupid” is a tremendous number and out of the ordinary. Shirkey asserts, “We are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers.” This quote makes you realize that the past is the past. There is no going back from computers and internet to books.

After reading Nicholas Carr’s article about the internet,it made me have a different view of the problems it causes not only to us physically but mentally as well.  I thought before that the internet was a useful tool that helped us look up information or anything of our choosing, I believed that it will lead to greater things.  Back in the days when the internet was made, it was saw to be a great thing at first but while the internet progresses so does an individual.  Nicholas Carr made me see that the internet can have its negative affects, negative affects being that people change the way they read, think & the way they even use the internet to their own benefit.  The way people read nowadays has become a struggle, “I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”(Pg.5), it’s become a struggle to them because they have a relied so much on the internet that all they do is skim through every reading that is handed to them . They skim through readings because they know the internet will provide them with a summary or the answer they are looking for from that reading. In addition to the internet affecting our minds, it affects us but it benefits others.  It benefits others because sometimes they would use to the internet for cyber bullying because it’s makes them feel better and they can also use the internet to rob peoples money.  The internet is a really useful tool however it depends on who uses it & how they use it.

The article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr has taught me that the internet is affecting how we read and concentrate, based on his statement “They found that people using sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity”, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited”(4) . This statement implies that people who use the internet do not take the time and effort to fully read any of the context of the site they were on, but instead they lose their focus and skip through them. To elaborate more, it’s a form of ” Deep versus Shallow Reading”, meaning that deep reading has become a struggle for people to stay focused on, so they end up resorting to skimming through the text. Which supports his previous statement that, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” (3). This has also showed me that the internet is affecting how our brains work by making us have trouble staying focus on any long article and having us develop a shallow sense of reading by skimming through the articles instead of just taking the time to just fully read them. In other words, Nicholas Carr is implying that the internet is making people forget how to read any sorts of long articles and develop a habit of skipping through the text and losing the concentration we had on them.This has taught me that the use of the internet is not always good and that it can cause you to lose focus on your reading.