Is Google Making Us Stupid? By Nicholas Carr
Carr through his personal experience states that Google and the internet reprogramming our
memory and remapping neural circuitry but not in the best way. He can not do immerse himself in a book or a lengthy article as he used to do because of his concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages and his deep reading is a struggle. The recently published study of online research habits which shows the internet users tend to hopping through the sites and skim the information quickly without any intention to revisit the sources and read the whole book or article. That habit has to be the key in the decline of the deep reading and the flourishing of horizontally through titles reading instead of the “outdated” linear way.
Reading is not encoded in human’s genes so we have to teach or mind to translate the symbolic characters. Our brain is very flexible in this aspect and shapes neural circuits easily if we practice enough the craft of reading. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading or even writing have a great influence on neurotic circuits’ remapping. For instance Friedrich Nietzsche without a typewriter could not have been managed to write down his thoughts so precisely. That instrument helped him to write down his thoughts fluently and it also had influence on his style of writing. He became tighter and more telegraphic. Nietzsche said “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” The way we think, read or write can easily change owing to our reprogrammable brain. Our inventions give us new, alter way of thinking and also took something away. For instance with the appearance of the clock we developed a scientific mind which based on the measurable time and we lost our natural sense of time and we started obeying the clock. Moreover people began to arrange most of their acts to the clock. The operation of the human brain became...