It's Not Education...It's Technology

Holy CRAP!! I really didn’t think that it was that bad…but I have now found my answer to my inability to focus on anything for more than a couple of minutes. Carr just put a whole new spin on the idea of the Internet, technology and Google. I mean I love Google, but now I think I’m a bit scared of it too. I don’t think Carr was trying to point at Google and blame the lack of knowledge we experience and their fault, but he does mention it.

First I just want to say I think he generalized it as Google because I feel like that is the first thing that people think of when they thing internet, so it makes sense. As for answering the question Carr clearly says, “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing,” “…it almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” Carr is talking about himself as well as his friends, and it’s as it reads, the Internet has caused us to forget. I think Carr is answering by saying that because we are able to receive blimps of information; we are unable to critically think about matters in a lengthy thought process. To his question “Is Google Making Us Stupid” Carr simply says, “We’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling.” Yeah I know I took it out of context, but honestly that is how he interoperates Google’s response to building artificial intelligence.

I think I have been mind blown! Hedges’s dives into a whole new element of America’s literacy that no one is bold enough to mention. In a nutshell Hedegs’s says America is, “dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, [and] has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture” which has resulted in “cater[ing] to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia,” and “prefer[s] happy illusions.”  Hedges’s defines literacy as not only the ability to read and right, but also the ability to comprehend the complexity of our culture and the world around us. I don’t find any part of his article confusing it makes sense…we have become so dependent of simplistic and unrealistic forms of thinking that we are lost in an illusion of a false reality.

Both articles make the connection of the idea that we are losing our minds, in a literal sense. We have “permanent amnesia”, we can only hand simple basic ideas, complexity frustrates us, and we progressively becoming our own worst enemy. Carr mentions how internet and technology is causing our down fall, and Hedges elaborates and the more subtle things that have been creating our down fall.