The evolution of technology -
and Google's role in-particular - is an interesting debate. As I was reading Carr's
article, I kept thinking about how ironic his article is as he argued that
people are becoming more accustomed to skimming articles, getting
easily distracted, and prefer shorter articles, or those that are broken up
into pages. It is interesting how this article was broken up into three pages, just as Carr was discussing how people lose focus on long articles (such as his.) Although Carr's article was not very deep in context, it was quite lengthy and made a
variety of points that were not always concise with each other. That is why I enjoyed this article more. This author was concise with his points and demonstrated them clearly. He also pointed out that the internet creates and mimics the way that humans truly think and engage - through discussion with others. Although the internet has shorter articles, humans are use to spur of the moment interaction, where one must think off the top of their head the opinion and the discussion is constantly changing. He claims that books "ignore the natural ways that humans learn through oral interaction and in a group." It is a more natural and rapid form of thinking. Thus, Google doesn't make us stupid. It simply allows us to communicate through a more natural means with one another.
I caught on to this fact also. I frequently found myself skimming his article (and to an extent, your response as well.) Do you think Carr made his article long and rambling intentionally? It would certainly help to prove his point.
ReplyDeleteI do think he might have, but if it was intentional, it was in the most obnoxious way possible. I know my response was long, I found myself going off on rants the more I delved myself into the texts. As I wrote my post, I found more things annoying me than I had when I first read the article.
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ReplyDeleteI don't think Google has necessarily made us any smarter or inhibited our learning but instead has changed the way we learn. It has given us the ability to learn little information about a lot of topics rather than a lot of information about fewer topics. I agree with what you're saying. I thought it was very interesting that Carr chose to prove his point by extending his own article. Im sure that many of us struggled to keep our attention focused on his article. While it does not prove Carr's point, it certainly makes a good argument for how learning is changing with the evolution of technology.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that the internet, and Google, have changed the way in which we learn. However, I also believe that it has diminished our retention of information. With the internet making information so readily available - and at ones finger tips - it has definitely has allowed people to forget information easier, because they have the ability to look it up at moments notice.
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