1. Has Google and the internet have altered the way we absorb information?
2. Google is "working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence", what will happent to human intelligence.
3. Has the internet affected our attention span?
Part 2
3. Has the internet affected our attention span?
In my opinion, feel that the internet has affected our
attention span. It makes it difficult to focus on reading an article on the
internet and even a book. Nicholas Carr’s article Is Google Making Us Stupid? He expresses how reading use to come naturally has now become a
struggle. He describes how he would get caught up in the narration of the book
but now his mind drifts after two or three pages. Then, he starts to get
fidgety, losses the thread, or starts looking for something else to do. When I finished
reading this article I became stunned not only because I related to parts of
the article but of the time. The time to when I started reading the article and
the time finished; I began reading the article at 6pmand finished at 9pm.
Granted I wasn’t a big reader growing up, but I never took three hours to read
11 pages. Looking back at my actions when reading the article I noticed to zone
in and out, reading a few then checking my phones internet because people would
send me links to funny pictures, after getting back to reading and rereading because
I forgot what I was reading. What I would also do is get up and walk around or
look up definitions to words and Googling the movie the Space Odyssey, because I didn’t get Carr’s reference. Carr also mentions
that Google and other companies collect information about us by the links we
click and the pages we view to feed us advertisements, which leads us to distraction.
This to me is true when after clicking
on the fifth link when I notice the advertisement it relates to the previous
page I have surfed and I tend to get distracted and click on it. I often noticed
myself skimming through something off the internet, because it seems too long. I
agree with Carr’s analogy about his attention span, “Once I was a scuba diver
in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski”. Who also
agrees with this analogy?
I agree that the Internet affects our attention span. There is so much to do online that gets us distracted so easily. Like you said, it can go from looking up random things on Google to dozing off. When Carr talked about how he gets fidgety and begins to loose concentration after a few page, I related with him also. I have the same issue as you with having to go back a reread because of the distractions from my phone Internet or wanting to do something else. However, I try to prevent getting distracted by my phone and put it on a different table, but it is a lot harder to prevent myself from looking up random things on Google when reading on my computer. Overall, it is so difficult to stay focused and I think we all just need some self-control to not drift off and surf the web while trying to keep a productive attention span.
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