Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Today it is so easy for us to sit down to do a research paper, open up the internet to look for some good sources to back up our argument, and end up on facebook or youtube five minutes later.  Let's be honest, it happens to all of us.  I would accredit this diversion to the influence of the internet -- an information god that promotes immediacy, convenience, speed, and most of all distractions.


Nicholas Carr, the author of this essay, touches on not only the influence that the internet has on our culture but also on the effects of it personally.  He says that the internet is changing the way we research topics by making them easily accessible, and it is also changing the way we think.  Before the invention of the internet, people used to be able to focus on long articles and novels and were better at the skills of deep reading and deep thinking, but now, a study conducted by a few scholars from the University College of London has proven that people are not reading deeply into the articles, they are merely skimming.  Carr has even experienced this for himself:
               
                "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."


Carr believes that as we use our "intellectual technologies", a phrase that was coined by the sociologist Daniel Bell, we start to resemble their characteristics.  A great example provided was the invention of the clock.  Instead of listening to our senses and the rhythm of our bodies, we now have a man-made schedule engrained into our minds of when to get up, to eat, to go to work, and to go to bed.  If the trend continues, we will inevitably start resembling the characteristics and attitudes of a computer, which in my opinion is extremely boring.  We will be a machine.


Carr had also mentioned that the media is changing as well.  Since our lives are so immersed in the internet, the older, more traditional forms of media -- newspapers, magazines, the radio, and television -- have to change their methods of giving us information as well. Carr explains that "Television programs add text crawls and pop-up adds, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-brows info-snippets."  Because we are so focused on maximizing speed, efficiency, and production, we need our other forms of media to represent this as well.  If they don't we shift our attention elsewhere.


Personally I think that it is really sad that humans, animals that are capable of building the Egyptian Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, and the Colosseum of Rome without computers, rely so much on them today.  I feel like people are loosing their personalities in technology, they are simply becoming robotic and following down the path that our society thinks will eventually lead each one of us to success, money, and happiness -- people are almost afraid to think for themselves now.  I also believe that the invention of the internet has implanted the idea that it is bad to be wrong.  We need to know everything or we are labeled as stupid and unintelligent, when in reality, it is the other way around.  We gain most of our knowledge from experience and mistakes, and if we "know" everything, do we really know anything at all?


There is another side to the argument though that I find valid.  The revolution of the internet has helped us connect with people all around the world, and in turn has helped people help so many other people who are in severe need.   It has made it possible for people in the United States to connect with people in Russia in a matter of seconds, and French businessmen are now able to buy and sell things with businessmen in Australia.  Technology and the internet has helped develop our global economy, which is actually really cool!  Yes, technology has changed our thought processes and shortened our attention spans, but it also has done a lot of great things for the world.


With everything new there are pros and cons and the internet is no exception.  We just need to use it responsibly.  It is like alcohol.  It is fun to use occasionally and in moderation, but if you use it way too much, it can have damaging effects.  I believe that if we can just find a nice balance between technology and healthy thinking habits, the internet can be a very good thing for the world.

Skunk Dreams

"Skunk Dreams" is an essay from The Georgia Review and was written by Louise Erdrich.  This has to be one of the more interesting and unique works that I have read.


Erdrich starts the essay by telling the reader about when she slept on a football field one beautiful, spring night in North Dakota, and a skunk happened to climb on top of her and fall asleep.  At first she was terrified of the wild animal, but soon she started wondering if skunks can dream, and if so, what about?  Erdrich then mentions that perhaps they were dreaming each other's thoughts.  She then continues on to say how cheap, cold, run-down motels give her the best dreams and explains that she had dreamt of a fenced in place where trees ran for miles inside it -- she said it almost seemed to transport her into the future.


Eventually Erdrich left North Dakota and moved out to New Hampshire, where, in her words, she was "urbanized".  She stated that the outdoors there were unimpressive -- "the sun did not pop" and the land seemed to contain "undramatic loveliness" -- but over time she became used to it.  Although she misses her home in North Dakota, she finds solace in the wind.  She loves how "windy days were like sitting just out of sight of an ocean, the great magnetic ocean of wind."  Because of her newly acquired love of the wind, Erdrich starts walking in the woods every day, further and further in.  Soon she stumbles across a fenced in place that looks exactly like her dream; it was a hunting club.  She longs to get inside the fence and to run with the animals (at a safe distance of course) and sees the fence as an obstacle that she needs to overcome.  


Finally Erdrich finds a way into the fence, and since then, has been inside of the park through various means.  She also talks about the hunters and the animals but noticed that skunks are never hunted for fun, they're just trapped and moved, never bothered.  Erdrich then offers the readers one last bit of advice:
                         " We should take comfort from the skunk, an arrogant creature so pleased with its own devices 
                           that it never runs from harm, just turns its back in total confidence."


As I was reading this nice yet confusing essay, I found myself wondering what the theme of this actually was.  At first I thought I was reading a work that talked about how everything in the universe is connected in one way or another, but then Erdrich started writing about actually finding her dream and overcoming an obstacle to achieve her desire.  Then she ended the essay with the notion that we shouldn't run away from our fears, we should face them head on.  Don't get me wrong, I thought this was very well written, but I am just a little unsure of what the message or moral of the story is; it seems a little scatterbrained. 
Maybe I'm not exploring the essay deep enough and there is a point to it that I missed entirely.  


Regardless of my confusion, I liked this essay, and I think that this will prompt a good class discussion in the future!