Write a brief letter to the editor of the Atlantic discussing Nicholas Carrs assertions about the internet.
Question:
Write a brief letter to the editor of the Atlantic discussing Nicholas Carr’s assertions about the internet. Use the information provided in the prompt below to guide your thinking and organize your thoughts into a focused argument that either supports or challenges Carr’s position.
In his article, “is Google making us stupid?” author Nicholas Carr contends that the internet is adversely affecting our ability to read deeply and carefully. In particular, he worries that “what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation… once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski”. To support this personal observation, Carr cites research examining the computer logs of two academic research sites. This research suggests that visitors to the site skipped and skimmed over sources, and visitors to the site “typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would ‘bounce’ out to another site”. Carr suggests this is evidence of our declining ability to concentrate on a single text and think deeply about issues, and he cites other scholars who worry that this approach to reading may negatively impact “our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction”. While Carr worries that the internet is making us stupid, author john Battelle argues that new technologies may breed important new intellectual practices, and he questions Carr’s assumption that “there’s simply nothing valuable occurring in our minds when we engage with the extraordinary new medium of the web”. Battelle adds a personal anecdote to those Carr sites in his article, observing that when I am deep in search for knowledge on the web, jumping from link to link, reading deeply in one moment, skimming hundreds of links the next, when i am pulling back to formulate and reformulate queries and devouring new connections as quickly as Google and the web can serve them up, when I am performing Bricolage in real time over the course of hours, I am “feeling” my brain light up, I am “feeling” like I’m getting smarter. A lot smarter, and in a way that only a human can be smarter, researchers like Carr believe the internet may seriously inhibit our ability to concentrate and contemplate important issues, while researchers like Battelle view our use of the internet in more positive terms. What do you believe? Is the internet making us dumber or smarter?