Nicole Carr Case

Internet is the network that links computer networks all over the world by satellite and now the telephone as well, connecting users with service networks such as e-mail and the World Wide Web. But that is just the definition of the internet if you ask the new generation of presently world and their meaning would be far more imperative than just a simple definition. It is now one of the essential of life, necessity of acknowledge where it comes from, processing and storing information at accelerated rate while multitasking. We are training our brains to be more and more like computers, getting all the countless information, data, facts, researches, and reviews at the instant of click. Nicholas Carr wrote a fascinating book the shallow which tells us his perspective about what the internet is doing to our brain.

According to Carr, the new media changes the way our brain works which is effecting how we read, remember, and majorly the way we think. "Digital immersion has even affected the way they absorb information. They don't necessarily read a page from left to right and from top to bottom, they might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest" (Carr, 9). He stated regarding a study which showed how new generation children are reading through the internet and their minds do not absorb all the information, they simple just scans it through. "Our ways of thinking, perceiving, and acting, we now know are not entirely determined by our genes. Nor are they entirely determined by our childhood experiences. We change them through the way we live - and as Nietzsche sensed, through the tools we use" (31). Here he points out the idea that the adult brain has become plastic. As we are constantly evolving and our brain is developing. We are shaped by the new media such as Internet, computers, media, etc. to not spend extra effort to do hard work to reach a satisfying accomplishment. It is now getting easier to just processing the information that we find without any hassle, leaving us with plastic brains due to it not being in use.

Our brains change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally make us more depended, even addictive. In the shallow, Carr mentioned how we lose parts of ourselves along with the usage of new technologies. For example, clocks made us lose our natural rhythm, Maps made us lose our special recognition capacities, and now the internet caused us to lose interest in doing the real hard work to stimulate our brains but instead we go search up on net what we need to find and process that information. Take the Microsoft office word document for another example, whatever we write it automatically changes the error we have made. Errors like grammar, spelling, or even the sentence functions which we were suppose to remember by our self without any help resulting in another sign of illiteracy. He mentions