The Seesaw

This last week, we were assigned to read two different articles about the internet/Google. The articles were called, "Does the Internet make you smarter?" by Clay Shirky, and "Is Google Making Us Stupider?" by Nicholas Carr. Since I have not really sat down and thought about how the internet was affecting me before, I felt like I received a major eye opener by reading these articles. The first article that I read, "Does the Internet make you smarter?" by Clay Shirky was a measurement between the argument on whether or not the new digital media is or is not benefiting the world intellectually. From Shirky's point of view, the use of the internet is exposing the world to a much more vast amount of information, while also getting people to read and write more than they ever had before. He explains that while people are exposed to many more unintellectual sources within the internet, the internet is still giving opportunity for more vast searches in research and understanding. To back up his argument, Shirky gives an example of how, "PatientsLikeMe, a website designed to accelerate medical research by getting patients to publicly share their health information, has assembled a larger group of sufferers of Lou Gehrig's disease than any pharmaceutical agency in history, by appealing to the shared sense of seeking medical progress." The article seems to imply that the situation of the internet lies within the hands of the future. The internet is viewed in a very black and white stance. There can't be black without white, and visa versa. The key is to see which side our future population predominately runs to. Will  the future still seek the intellectual door in which the internet provides access to? Or will we instead seek out the less intelligent aspects that the world wide web brings? 

The next article our class read was "Is Google Making Us Stupider?" by Nicholas Carr, who gave his own point of view as to what he thought the internet is doing to the world. In Carr's point of view, the internet is hurting our ability to focus for long periods of time on one writing, because of the 'get it and go' pace that the internet uses. As Carr states, "What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation...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 agrees that there are many sources of intellectual information on the world wide web. The Issue is that instead of getting to the nitty gritty of the information, people are skimming to find the exact answer to what they want to know, and then moving on to a new source of information or moving on to something completely different. He does agree that the world population is reading and writing more than ever before, but the reading and writing are coming in the more simplistic terms rather than the lengthy, thought out contexts. Our brains are evolving and beginning to function in a totally new and different way...which could really hurt us in the future. Carr quotes, "If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture." What else might we lose? 

As said before, both of these articles were major eye openers for me. I found both of these articles a little scary, because it seems that whether the internet is making us smarter or stupider depends upon each person. I feel as if all people have their own personal intellectual seesaw (yes, the playground toy that we used to play on as children.)They get to decide whether they want to research about something intellectual or whether they want to surf the web for funny videos of people doing stupid things. They also get to decide whether or not they want to read and research everything on a particular topic or page, or if they want to skim and find the exact information they want to find when they want to find it. It's a seesaw for each and every person, and personally, I think it will be what determines if people use the internet to either increase or decrease their intellectual knowledge. This can all be quite scary to me, because already, I find myself reading the books I once read quite often, a lot less. Instead, I get on the internet, and go to my social media sites or go onto StumbleUpon to find the next big or funny thing. Am I letting myself be one of those people who is sliding to the stupider side of the seesaw? If so, I feel that I need to make a come back to turn myself around, before my brain has totally reactivated itself to act like a computer.