Is google making us stupid PDF

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Is google making us stupid? Nicholas Carr What is the internet doing to our brains? -

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Concentration of reading and writing is now much shorter because the internet passages are small and discrete For a lot of people the net is becoming the universal medium As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They sypply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of tought The brain tends to expect information the way that the internet distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. The ability to focus on long texts is now hindered because of the internet Internet provides a different kind of reading, behind it lies a different kind of thinking-perhaps even a new sense of the self. Wolf – Maryanne Wolf psychologist – “ we are how we read” , she worries that the style of reading promoted by the net, a style that puts efficiency an immediacy above all else Daniel Bell describes- “intellectual technologies”- the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities The invention of the mechanical clock led to the decisiveness of when to eat, to work, to sleep, we stopped listening to our sense and started obeying the clock

“ When the net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the nets image. It injects mediums content with hyperlinks, blinking ads and other digital gewgaws and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new email message for instance, may anounze its arrival as we are glancing over the latest headlines at a newspapers site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration”

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Old media have little choice but to play by the new media rules. Internet has a great influence on our thoughts The nets intellectual ethic remains obscure Fredrick Winslow Taylor created the tight industrial choreography- his system. Embraced by manufactures throughout the country and around the world. …” In the past the man has been first” he declared: “ in the future the system must be first” Google – a company founded around the science of measurement- uses results to refine the alogirthms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence....