Purpose
To warn people it is possible that the continuous use of the internet is permanently changing our brain and the ability to form are own ideas
Audience
Anyone who spends a lot of time, whether in business, or just surfs the internet, to find information or the general curiosity.
Author
He is a technology writer, with an educational background in literature. As a baby boomer he has seen a great change in the use of technology and its place in everyday life.
Genre
I would say the genre would be a warning label. Constant change in technology is changing the way you think. Online magazine article.
Context
Having grown up with the increased use of technology, and watching science fiction movies such as “Space Odyssey 2001 – the author is expressing his fears and presenting support of this fear that humans may become more robotic than a computer. time and place
Specific Points
I’m not thinking the way I used to think.
Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.
Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.
Media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought but they also shape the process of thought, and what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation
Bruce Friedman said “His thinking has taken on a “staccato” quality reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online.
They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity.”
New forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
Maryanne Wolf said,” We are how we read.”
Reading explains Wolf is not an instinctive skill for human beings
We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter once he had mastered touch-typing he was able to write with his eyes closed using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
“You are right” Neitzsche said our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable.
The brain according to James Olds, has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly altering the way it functions.
The mechanical clock which came into common use in the 14th century provides a compelling example.
In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
When the mechanical clock arrived people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today in the age of software we have come to think of them as operating “like computers”
The internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition.
The internet an immeasurably powerful computing system is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone and our radio and tv.
The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration. When the Net absorbs a medium that medium is re-created in the nets image.
The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
By breaking down every job into a sequence of small discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one. Fredrick Winslow Taylor created a set of precise instructions- an “algorithm,” we might say today – for how each worker should work. The factories employees grumbled about the strict new regime claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons but the factory’s productivity soared.
The goal Taylor said was to identify and adopt for every job the one best method of work and thereby to effect the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts
The internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection transmission and manipulation of information and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the one best method the perfect algorithm
To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
The more pieces of information we can access and the faster we can extract their gist the more productive we become as thinkers.
The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people or smarter
Google is really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.
Still their easy assumption that we’d all be better off it our brains were supplemented
The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow concentrated thought Its in their economic interest to drive us to distraction
In Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates bemoaned the development of writing.
Written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would in the words of one of the dialogues characters cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.
The arrival of Gutenbergs printing press in the 15th century set off another round of teeth gnashing.
Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority demean the work of scholars and scribes and spread sedition and debauchery.
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the authors words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.
We make our own associations draw our own inferences and analogies foster our own ideas. Deep reading as Maryanne Wolf argues is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
As we are drained of our inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance we risk turning into pancake people.
2001 the computers emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark its childlike pleading with the astronaut – I can feel it
In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubricks dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
Catalyst
The catalyst is about the technology and it is effecting the human brain.
It is possible that the continuous use of the internet is permanently changing our brain and the ability to form are own ideas.
Main claim
I’m not thinking the way I used to think.
Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.
Supports
Media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought but they also shape the process of thought, and what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation
The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people or smarter
The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the authors words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds
We make our own associations draw our own inferences and analogies foster our own ideas. Deep reading as Maryanne Wolf argues is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration. When the Net absorbs a medium that medium is re-created in the nets image
Linkages
“I can feel it, I can feel it.”
The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration. When the Net absorbs a medium that medium is re-created in the nets image.
Implications
In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubricks dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.