"Is Google Making Us Stupid" Assignment: Reaction.

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" was published in 2008 by Nicholas Carr and claims that using the internet thought a great source of information and entertainment comes at the cost of a decreased ability to process and understand the deeper meanings in writings and it dulls your sense of reliability and memory. But the article is very neutral but Carr does believe what he says and is passionate about the topic. His purpose was to inform people, mostly teenagers and tech-savvy adults of the possible danger of the internet, so they can use the internet and benefit while resisting some of the changes extended internet use has on your brain.
        This post is a reaction not a reflection so I'm going to talk a lot about my own feelings on the topic and address things I liked and things I disliked. Okay, so in the second and third paragraph, Carr talks about feeling his mind changing, the way he thinks changing and says that "I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading"(Carr paragraph 2). He is referring to books and I looked at this and was confused because I spend lots of time online either working on school assignments (like this), playing video games or watching videos. Not once have I ever felt that I couldn't focus on a book because of my use of the internet rewiring my brain. Carr believes the internet reprograms our brains to be more efficient and streamline, the metaphor he used was "I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski"(Carr 4). I love how accurate that metaphor is because I agree with what Carr is saying in that people have transitioned from deep focused reading to a, get the gist and move on, form of reading. This is one of the over-arching themes in the article so I want to dive into it a little more and give tell you that though I agree with what Carr says I think this can be prevented if not, definitely decreased. The fact that the internet makes you brain take on this fast-paced search and move attitude is true but just like with other functions of the brain it's just a switch of a switch. What I mean by this is that if you have both a deep readers mindset, which can be developed or redeveloped through more book reading and less time on the net, and a search and go mindset then you should be able to switch back and forth between the two while performing a specific task. If someone is able to switch between these two mindsets then the negative effects of the net should diminish if not disappear because you can still focus on obtaining the deeper meaning in books and articles while at other times you can simply find the little bits of information you need; this would also mean you can still enjoy a nice book without your brain trying to jump around on you. This post is already over 500 words so I guess I'm being a little wordy but that was the main point I wanted to talk about but another smaller detail I want to address lies in a quote from Maryanne Wolf, "We are not only what we read. We are how we read" going on to say that the net makes us "mere decoders of information"(Wolf 8). The quote is followed up with a statement that suggests we lose our ability to both "interpret text" and  make "rich mental connections" because of the net changing our thinking process. For me when I read a book I try to make connections and interpret the text but I also fill like I'm a decoder of information because I try and draw connections from events at the beginning of a book to what happens toward the end. So, I guess the point I want to make is that learning to decode information is an important tool for life and it is being developed from the use of internet and reflecting over into the reading of long books is a positive side effect of internet use.  Now I have other things I could talk about but I don't want an 800-word post so I'm logging off here. Hope you enjoyed the post. BYE.