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Contents contributed and discussions participated by eeverett3

eeverett3

The internet: is it changing the way we think? | Technology | The Observer - 1 views

  • American writer Nicholas Carr's claim that the internet is not only shaping our lives but physically altering our brains has sparked a lively and ongoing debate, says John Naughton. Below, a selection of writers and experts offer their opinion
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    Writers, academics and scientists respond to Nicholas Carr's claim that the internet is physically altering our brains. By John Naughton
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    Thank you for all the comments and discussion this week. Many of the points that you brought up were discussed in this follow-up article. Enjoy!
eeverett3

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr - The Atlantic - 8 views

  • My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
    • eeverett3
       
      The first question this article raises in my mind is...are other people feeling like this? that books and long articles are becoming too difficult to read?
    • eeverett3
       
      I actually have a student this year who cannot use the computer at all because it causes seizures for her! Scary!
  • And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
    • eeverett3
       
      I really like this analogy of finding information online. I often feel like this and in my library, I see students seraching so rapidly that I wonder if their research is effective.
  • It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.
    • eeverett3
       
      I wonder if reading habits are changing and if this is good or bad...how will it affect students and educators?
    • eeverett3
       
      That is a great article,Don! I am glad to see that what I am yelling at my teens all the time is backed up by research! "When people try to perform two or more related tasks either at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go way up, and it takes far longer--often double the time or more--to get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially, says David E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan: "The toll in terms of slowdown is extremely large--amazingly so." I worry about the multitasking all the time...has anyone seen the tv show "Brain Games"? I think that really illustrates the hazards of multitasking....
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    Here is an article that discusses the use of current technology and how it may affect the brain.
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    I hope that everyone had a great Spring Break! Here is the article that I would like to discuss in Diigo that week. :) EE
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