Is Google Making Us Stupid? Section One

Main Idea
Our minds, the way we think, and the way we read are changing because of the fast paced nature of the internet.

Most Convincing Claims
"My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but it's changing."
"And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation."
These two claims are convincing because of the evidance supporting them. Carr gives his own account, the accounts of two bloggers (one on online media and one on the use of computers in medicine), and a 5 year research program conducted by the scholars the University College of London. Carr and the bloggers both express the loss of attention to long pieces of writing because of time spent online dispite their backgrounds in profession and education. The research done by the University College of London shows that reading has been replaced by skimming. They found that people using electronical databases to find journals and books would bounce from site to site, not spending enough time to read any whole article throughly.

Interesting Complex Claims
"Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more than we did in the 1970s or 1980s...But its a different kind of reading."