What
Inspired
the Author to write in this form? The other author wrote in this form to figure
out if the internet is making us stupid or if it’s making us think in a fast
and different way. As Nicolas Carr begins to talk about the way he used to
think is much different to the way he thinks now. In his own words he puts it “Now
my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety,
lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do” (1). And he feels as if he is always dragging
himself back to the text (1). In the other hand it makes us get answers much
more quickly but that’s all it does for us at the moment. As the author of the study of online research
habits responds, “it is clear that users are not reading online in the
traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are
emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages
and abstracts going for quick wins” (Carr 3). This put “Efficiency” and “Immediacy”
above all else (Carr 3). I found myself
doing the same thing all throughout my high school and college career trying to
avoid reading navels and textbooks and always going back to the internet to
find my answers. It does make me feel distracted and out of focus when it comes
to reading articles or short stories because I feel like the answer should be summarized
even smaller. It’s the efficiency and immediacy that is wanted every time.
Why does the Author
believe the web has been godsend to him as a writer? “Research that once
required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in
minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got
the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.” (Carr 1). The Internet is
becoming the fastest way to get access information and is giving us the
capacity to learn about any given subject, as Carr explains it, “The Net is becoming
a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through
my eyes and ears and into my mind” (1). Nowadays, everything is at the tip of
the fingers and just a few clicks away and you have access to everything,
whether is your emails, searching for an articles, blogging , wanting to watch
a video or movie, listening to music, look for contacts, translator sentences, and
down loading software programs and saving things on the cloud.
Why is Google trying to
systematize everything it does? “In the past man was first” (Carr 6), “in the
future the system must be first” (Carr 6). According to the Harvard Business Review,
it says, it can use the result to refine the algorithms that increasingly
control how people find information and extract meaning from it (Carr 6). The Google
founders want to turn their master piece into a HAL like machine that has
extreme intelligence that is far more advanced than a humans brain (Carr 7). I would
think this would make us more knowledgeable of everything in the world and even
expand your ideas but at the same time it would make us stupid in a way,
because it wouldn’t allow us to really soak anything into our brains and
therefore making us rely on computers at all times. We are not too far from it.
