Final Essay

Ally Ferrell

RWS 100

Professor Werry

December 15, 2014

Final Paper

Just a few decades ago, the internet was made available to the general public for the first time. Almost everyone you see will have access to the web sitting in their pocket or even just at the tip of their fingers. The internet is used for research, communication, entertainment, shopping and so much more. I couldn't imagine that there is a person in any developed country over the age of 5 that doesn't know what Google is. There is no doubt that this technology has completely changed the way that us humans live. One thing that most can agree on is that the internet is in fact changing the way we think. However, many disagree on whether is is a negative or positive change. It’s important to discuss the effects of the internet because of its relevance in our society. It’s not going away any time soon. Many people have researched and shared their personal opinions on the topic to the public. Nicholas Carr is a columnist and author who focuses on the affect of technology on our mentality. In, Carr’s article,“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, from The Atlantic, he argues that the internet is negatively affecting our minds. Clive Thompson has been a long-time writer for the New York Times Magazine and focuses on writing about digital technologies and their social and cultural impact. In Thompson’s article, “Public Thinking”, from his book, Smarter Than You Think, he claims that the internet is positively affecting our minds due to the writing and publicness of it. Howard Rheingold, an author who as always been intrigued in the effects of technology on the mind, claims in his article "Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies” that the internet helps our brains in many ways. In this essay, I will explain Carr’s ,Thompson’s, and Rheingold’s general views and opinions and a few of their specific sub-arguments. I will then enter the conversation, arguing my point on the topic using outside sources and personal experiences as evidence.

In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, from The Atlantic, he claims that the current amount of use of the internet has serious negative effects on our cognitive behavior. One of his main sub-claims is that the use of the internet is worsening our ability to concentrate on one thing for a long period of time. He gives a personal example of when he tries to read a book in present day, “my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do” (Carr). He argues that with all of the hyperlinks and distractions on the internet, we are constantly switching focus from one thing to another. With today’s technology, one is able to have multiple tabs open, quickly switching between them as he or she pleases. Carr believes that this habit transfers over to real life as we are unintentionally learning to not be able to concentrate on one thing at a time. Another of Carr’s sub-claims is that we are also reading less quality works than before, which is not helping us become any more intelligent. Anyone can post on the internet and it’s hard to tell whats credible or not. Also, because the internet is a main media for entertainment, we are reading things that we enjoy rather than educational things. In their personal time, a person would probably rather read the more entertaining story about Kim Kardashian’s nudes leaking than a report on A person is far more likely to find false information on the internet and believe it, therefor causing deteriorating intelligence.

Contrary to Carr, in Clive Thompson’s essay, “Public Thinking”, from his book, Smarter Than You Think, he claims that the internet is actually improving our overall cognitive behavior. Thompson says “There are thousands of other forums crammed full of writing, ranging from twenty-six thousand Star Wars stories to more than seventeen hundred pieces riffing off Shakespeare’s works” (Thompson). With all of the options, of course we are going to switch from page to page. Thompson argues that the internet now has more things that actually interest people, so they are reading more. People may be switching sites more often, but they are reading more over all. Also, when one reads something that interests them, they are more likely to retain the information. However, Thompson goes on to argue that it isn't the reading we do, but in fact  the increase of writing due to the internet. He claims that “the internet has produced a foaming Niagara of writing”(Thompson). He goes on to impose that writing for an audience, even if its small helps people form ideas into words, create new ideas, and share information. Knowing people will be reading your writing, will usually cause you to think more about what you are going to say and create a more compelling and supported argument. Thompson is saying that we may do more reading and that it helps our minds, but that isn't as important as the writing we do.

Howard Rheingold, in his article "Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies”, focuses more on the effects social medias have on our minds. Rheingold argues that by using social medias, such as Twitter and Facebook, we work on our attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness and critical consumption. He complicates Carr’s claim that the internet worsens our complete attention to one thing at a time by arguing that the shared focus actually helps with multitasking. He says that attention is the "fundamental building block of how individuals" think, create tools, socialize, and transform civilizations. Contrary to Carr, Rheingold quotes Linda Stone who says that multitasking and continuous partial attention is just as good to work on as focused attention.(Rheingold). We need to know both so that we know how to focus on multiple things at once or on just one thing when necessary. The internet and distractions that come with it help form the skill of multi-tasking. Rheingold again complicates Carr’s claim that the internet is causing us to read non-quality works, lowering our intelligence. He argues that we are learning critical consumption, or what Ernest Hemingway called “crap detection”(Rheingold). This is the ability to find out what and who is trustworthy. We do this on the internet all the time when researching. People are, for the most part, aware that anybody can post on the internet. This awareness creates a sense of caution. We practice identifying bias and non-credible sources. 

As an 18-year old college student in 2014, technology and the internet are and always have been extremely relevant in my life. My laptop is my lifeline for class and entertainment. As I write this essay right now, I have two different documents open on Word, five tabs open on my internet browser, and my online calendar and iTunes minimized. 100% of the homework and projects I do for school is online.  My major is mechanical engineering and both of the classes I am taking for it right now are on a computer. The other day, I was doing some of my online physics homework and couldn't figure out a question. I quickly opened a new tab, copied and pasted the question, and found the solution on yahoo answers. I could have easily just copied the answer and submitted it for full credit, but instead I looked at the process and learned how the answer was found. Instead of just leaving this question blank or spending 20 minutes searching through my text book to only see the formulas I already knew, I instantly learned how to get the answer.

When it comes to my opinion on the subject, I automatically find myself agreeing mostly with Thompson and Rheingold, however, I think that,like most people, I just want to think the best of myself. I grew up with the internet and want to believe that it has helped me become as educated and as studious as I possibly can be. I took a step back, did some of my own research, and came up with a more unbiased opinion. All three authors bring up great points. This topic isn't just black and white, it has to be some shade of grey. These men all have valid points, however, they all fail to bring up an important point relevant to the topic. The authors are putting the entire fate of our minds up to the internet, and put no responsibility on the user. The internet is extremely relevant and isn't going away anytime soon, so no matter the effects of it, we should be focusing more on how to use it to its maximum potential rather than if we should use it at all or not. Many schools are considering replacing textbooks with tablets. Besides the pros and cons related to price and physical health, there are also many pros and cons of the effects to the mind and learning considered by “Should Tablets Replace Textbooks in K-12 Schools?”. One of the pros argued is that “tablets help students learn more material faster. Technology-based instruction can reduce the time students take to reach a learning objective by 30-80%, according to the US Department of Education and studies by the National Training and Simulation Association”. Instead of telling kids to put down their phones and to go read a book, we should be teaching them how to use their phone for more educational purposes. So many people do things only if it is convenient to them. The internet saves time and “time is money”.  And it is so much easier to quickly type something into a search engine than go to a library. When in class, if a topic sparks interest to a student, he or she can quickly and immediately google more info on the topic and share with the class to start a group discussion. This promotes the learning of research and group arguments and discussions. Of course there is the counterargument that kids will just use the tablets for entertainment, uneducational sites, and distractions. My response to that is that there always has been and there will always be the people who don't use their resources wisely. Regardless if it a library or a tablet, some people will use it to its full potential and some will not. When the internet was not around and the only way to find out the answer to a question was to go to the library, there were people who would go to the library and people who wouldn’t. It’s all about the inclination and personal values of the person.

Why is this important? Technology is advancing more and more every day. If we can not learn to use our current technology to its full potential, we will never be able to progress as a society. Way back when writing became easier for the general public to do, some philosophers claimed that this would hurt our minds, similar what to people are saying about the internet in present day. Where would we be today if we had listened to them? The internet is not going away, it is only going to be more advanced and have easier access. In order to advance as a society, we need to use the tools we have to its maximum potential.

Works Cited

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  The Atlantic. July/August 2008. Web.

Thompson, Clive. “Public Thinking_.” Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing 

Our Minds for the Better. N.p: Penguin, 2014. 45-69. Print.

Rheingold, Howard. “Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies”. Educase 

Review Online. October 7, 2010. Web.

“Should Tablets Replace Textbooks in K-12 Schools?” ProCon.  April 9, 2014. Web. 

http://www.tablets-textbooks.procon.org

Rough Draft

Just a few decades ago, the internet was made available to the general public for the first time. There is no doubt that this technology has completely changed the way that humans live, interact, and think. But many disagree on whether is is a negative or positive change. One thing that most can agree on is that the internet is in fact changing the way we think. In, Carr’s article he argues that the internet is negatively affecting our minds while in Thompson’s article, he claims that the internet is positively affecting our minds. In this essay, I will explain Carr’s and Thompson’s general views and opinions on specifically how internet affects our concentration  and attention and our reading and writing skills. I will then enter the conversation, arguing my point on the topic using outside sources as evidence.

In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, from The Atlantic, he claims that the current amount of use of the internet has serious negative effects on our cognitive behavior. He argues that the internet is worsening our ability to concentrate on one thing for a long period of time. He gives a personal example, “my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidget, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do” (Carr). He argues that with all of the hyperlinks and distractions on the internet, we are constantly switching focus and unintentionally learning not to be able to concentrate on one thing.  Carr also claims that we are also reading less quality works than before, therefore  not helping us become more intelligent. Anyone can post on the internet and it’s hard to tell whats credible or not. A person is far more likely to find false information on the internet and believe it, therefor causing worsening intelligence.

Contrary to Carr, in Clive Thompson’s essay, “Public Thinking”, from his book, Smarter Than You Think, he claims that the internet is actually improving our overall cognitive behavior. Thompson says “There are thousands of other forums crammed full of writing, ranging from twenty-six thousand Star Wars stories to more than seventeen hundred pieces riffing off Shakespeare’s works” (Thompson). With all of the options, of course we are going to switch from page to page. Thompson argues that the internet now has more things that actually interest people, so they are reading more. People may be switching sites more often, but they are reading more over all. Also, when one reads something that interests them, they are more likely to retain the information. However, Thompson goes on to claim that it isn't the reading we do, but the increase of writing due to the internet. Writing helps people form ideas into words, create new ideas, and share information. Carr claims that our thinking is worsening because we get distracted while we read, but Thompson claims that it’s the writing that we do on the internet that helps us rather than the reading.

As an 18-year old college student in 2014, technology and the internet are extremely relevant in my life. My laptop is my lifeline for class and entertainment. As I write this essay right now, I have two different documents open on Word, five tabs open on my internet browser, and my online calendar and iTunes minimized. Come midterm week and you will see my computer glued to me. 100% of the homework and projects I do for school is online. Yesterday I was doing some of my online physics homework and couldn't figure out a question. I quickly opened a new tab, copied and pasted the question, and found the solution on yahoo answers. I could have easily just copied the answer and submitted it for full credit, but instead I looked at the process and learned how the answer was found. When I have a random question about anything that popped into my head because something that happened that day, I can google it and find out the answer. This leads me too pages and links to other pages about the topic, which I will often read through. I am pretty sure that if I had a question and didn't have access to google, I would not go to the library and find a book with the answer. It is said that time is money so it shouldn't be wasted. Google offers the opportunity to educate one’s self in minimal time.

When it comes to my opinion on the subject, I find myself agreeing mostly with Thompson’s overall view, that the internet is good for our mental skills. However, both authors fail to bring up some important points relevant to the topic. Both authors are putting the entire fate of our minds up to the internet, and put no responsibility on the user. The internet is extremely relevant and isn't going away anytime soon. People could easily use the internet only for plagiarism, looking up answers for homework, and unconstructive uses. But there are so many people who use it wisely. We need to focus more on teaching people on how to use the internet for more educational uses. Instead of just telling kids to put down their phone and go to the library and read a book, we should be telling kids to download the book app, learn how to use an online data base, etc.

outline

outline : 

focus 1: concentration/attention

focus 2 : writing/reading

• Intro 
• attention getter
• background info
• metadiscourse

• Carr
• carr’s overall claim
• the internet has serious negative effects on our cognitive behavior
• carr’s sub claim
• the internet is worsening our concentration
• quote from carr to support his subclaim
• explanation/analysis of claim
• carr’s second sub claim
• were reading less and less quality things than ever
• quote from second sub claim
• explanation/analysis of second sub claim 
• transition to thompson

• Thompson
• thompsons overall claim 
• the internet has improved our overall cognitive behavior
• thompsons first sub claim
• quote for first sub claim
• analysis/explanation of first sub claim and how connects with carr’s first sub claim 
• thompsons second sub claim
• we may not be reading as much, but we are writing and participating which is more important
• quote for second sub claim
• explanation/analysis of sub claim 2 and how connects with car’s second sub claim
• transition to my argument( strengths and weaknesses of carr and thompson)

• my argument 
• anecdote
• my main claim
• the internet can have negative and positive effects, it all depends on how its used
• my first sub claim
• the internet helps us to learn multitasking
• quote from rheingold to support my first sub claim
• how my first sub claim connects to carr and thompson’s first sub claims
• my second sub claim
• the internet has caused us to produce less original works, plagiarism and copyright
• quote from Hayles to support my second sub claim
• how my second cub claim connects to carr and thompsons second sub claim
• what they dont bring up and my opinion

• conclusion
• so what?
• what we can do to improve

• annotated bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

Carr’s claim: The internet is worsening out concentration and focus in the real world. 

My claim : The internet does cause distractions from many things, however it isn't always a bad thing. It can be an educational distraction and it can teach a person to multitask. Some people may use it irresponsibly, just for games and plagiarism, while others use it to learn and connect with others. It depends on the user whether or not the internet is beneficial or not. The internet isn't just going away, we need to use it and learn how to use it to its maximum potential.

I will use Thompson to complicate Carr’s claim that we may be reading on the internet, but it isn't quality. Thompson says that it’s the writing and publicness, not just the reading.

I will use Rheingold to complicate Carr’s claim that the internet causes distractions, because he agrees that it causes distractions, but he believes that these distractions are helpful to our real world multitasking problems. 

Outline

• Intro

• Carr’s argument

• Thompson complicates

• (Rheingold complicates)

• I complicate (with another source Hayle or Rheingold)

• So what?/conclusion

() one or the other

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  The Atlantic. July/August 2008. Web.

Thompson, Clive. “Public Thinking_.” Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better. N.p: Penguin, 2014. 45-69. Print.

Rheingold, Howard. “Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies”. Educase Review Online. October 7, 2010. Web.

Anecdote

As an 18-year old college student in 2014, technology and the internet are extremely relevant in my life. My laptop is my lifeline for class and entertainment. As I write this essay right now, I have two different documents open on Word, five tabs open on my internet browser, and my online calendar and iTunes minimized. Come midterm week and you will see my computer glued to me. 100% of the homework and projects I do for school is online. Yesterday I was doing some of my online physics homework and couldn't figure out a question. I quickly opened a new tab, copied and pasted the question, and found the solution on yahoo answers. I could have easily just copied the answer and submitted it for full credit, but instead I looked at the process and learned how the answer was found. When I have a random question about anything that popped into my head because something that happened that day, I can google it and find out the answer. This leads me too pages and links to other pages about the topic, which I will often read through. I am pretty sure that if I had a question and didn't have access to google, I would not go to the library and find a book with the answer. It is said that time is money so it shouldn't be wasted. Google offers the opportunity to educate one’s self in minimal time. 

If you look around San Diego State’s campus you are likely to see almost everyone else doing the same as me. Although, I am not guilty of this, you will also likely see students popping Adderal like it’s nothing. 100% of the homework and projects I do for school is online. 

Attention Literacies summary

"Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies " from Educase Review  by Howard Rheigngold, claims that we need to start utilizing the internet to its full potential. Rheingold challenges Carr by saying that social medias, such as Twitter and Facebook, actually improve our cognitive skills. He says we work on our attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness and critical consumption. Rheingold says that to master all of these skills, you must work on all of them, the come hand in hand. He then goes into detail about these 5 subjects. He says that attention is the "fundamental building block of how individuals" think, create tools, socialize, and transform civilizations. Contrary to Carr, Rheingold quotes Linda Stone who says that multitasking and continuous partial attention is just as good to work on as focused attention. We need to know both so that we know how to focus on multiple things at once or on just one thing when necessary. The internet and distractions that come with it help form the skill of multi-tasking. Rheingold then goes on to participation. He says that even if the thing you say isn't useful or good, it “gives one a different sense of being in the world”. He’s basically saying what Thompson quoted, “90% of everything is crap…” . Next is collaboration. Like Thompson said with the theory of multiples, Rheingold says “in general doing things together gives us more power than doing things alone”. Next network awareness. With the internet and social media, we are able to make more social interactions than ever which Rheingold connects with freedom. Finally critical consumption, which Ernest Hemingway called “crap detection”. This is the ability to find out what and who is trustworthy. We do this on the internet all the time and this helps with our real life skills.

Overall Rheingold is saying that the internet, more specifically social media, helps us with skills that carry over into real life.

Carr Rough Draft

Ally Ferrell

November 14, 2014

RWS 100

Professor Werry

Is Google Making Us Stupid Essay

Today, we have access to technology at just the tip of our fingers. Instead of going to the library and researching from books and journals, we are able to type in any question into Google and almost instantly have thousands of results.  My instinctive thought, along with many others', is that this technology and access to knowledge would actually improve how we think and the amount we learn. However, some claim that the advancement of technology has actually changed the way people think in a negative way. Nicholas Carr, a columnist and author who focuses on the affect of technology on our mentality, agrees with the latter. In Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he claims that the extreme use and reliance of the internet has deteriorated people’s overall cognitive behavior. He believes that people have smaller attention spans and worsened critical thinking and reading skills. In this essay I will examine the rhetorical strategies Carr uses in his article, ethos, metaphors, and prolepsis. I will show how they support his argument, why he chooses the particular strategy and examine the overall effectiveness of support to his main claim of one of his strategies. 

One of the rhetorical strategies that Carr uses to help convince the reader of his argument is the Aristotelian appeals, ethos. Ethos is used to give credibility to the author. Carr states in the beginning of his article, “immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy” and “for more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing”(58). This gives Carr credibility because it shows that he has actually experienced what he is writing about. He shows that he is a literary type and has used the internet often in the past decade. These two things are the main components of his claim. It’s hard to believe an author when he or she is talking about something that has never happened to them. He says that he is the literary type because if he just said that he uses the internet and can’t stay focused, there would be nothing to compare it to and his attention deficit could have easily been present before the internet use. By saying that this phenomenon has happened to him, he is far less likely to sound like it is just the "selfie generation" that isn't as advanced as previous generations and possibly offend the younger generations. I think that this strategy could have been much more effective in helping him support his claim. The magazine this article was posted in, The Atlantic, has a demographic of older people in the same generation as Carr. Throughout the essay, Carr uses sources and examples that are more relevant to the older generations.  It is unlikely that someone in their teens or early 20s would be reading this magazine. Also, he gives plenty of other examples of his friends and other people who have had the same effect from the internet, his personal example does not make much of a difference. I think that Carr would've developed a better credibility if he had talked more about his previous research,works, and his experience on the subject of the affect of the internet.

Another strategy that Carr uses is a metaphor. He compares the famous movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey” to present day. Carr quotes the movie when the character Dave takes apart HAL, the computer that runs the spaceship and has killed his crew mates. Carr quotes, “ ‘Dave,stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?’ So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. ‘Dave, my mind is going,’ HAL says forlornly. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it.’ I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory”(Carr p 58). Carr uses the disassembling of the computer’s memory as a metaphor to the disintegration of his and everyone elses’ memories due to technology. Carr chooses words such as “tinkering”, “circuitry”, and “reprogramming”. This word choice suggests that Carr feels like a robot. HAL, contrary to humans, was chained to a wall and could not stop his own disassembly. However, us humans have more control than that, or do we. This metaphor shows that Carr feels as though we are helpless to this change, just as HAL was. We have become addicted to the internet and the technology that we have such easy access to often at the end of our fingertips. 

Another way Carr attempts to convince his readers is his use of the strategy prolepsis. Prolepsis is the acknowledgement of a popular counterargument and addressing why it is wrong. This is necessary so that readers are not as easily able to tear apart an argument. If an author fails to bring up a common contrary belief, the readers may assume that he or she has not done research or just ignores others’ opinions. Carr says “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s… but it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking”(Carr p 60). Carr is bringing up the argument that since we are reading more than ever, we are thinking more and better. This argument can be seen in Clive Thompson’s popular article Public Thinking, which basically claims the exact opposite of Carr. If Carr had not brought this up, readers who may have read Thompson’s article or come up with the idea themselves would just assume that Carr completely missed that idea. By acknowledging it, he is able to show why he believes it is not true and give evidence for that. Although, Carr does bring up a part of Thompson’s counterargument, he doesn't bring up all of it. Thompson claims that the internet has improved are thinking because we are writing for the public more rather than reading more. Carr not bringing this up makes it seem like he’s just ignoring it because he does not have sufficient evidence to show why it is wrong.

In conclusion, Carr uses many strategies in his article in order to convince the reader, even though some of them may not be as effective as he thought. Because I am in the generation that grew up with constant access to the internet, it is difficult for me to tell how the internet has affected my thinking because I have nothing previous to compare it to. I personally am able to read long books but also get deferred from pages on my iPhone due to distractions. I think that Carr has a valid point, but the total effect the internet has depends on the impressionability of the person and is not as detrimental as Carr makes it out to be.