Reading Response 5

Reading to Learn
In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr, he explains how the use of the internet has an effect on the user. The effects that are happening is; “research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.” And that the “net is becoming a universal medium for most of the information that flows though my eyes and ears and into my mind. A study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London suggests that we are possibly in the process of changing how we read and think. They found that people using the sites showed “a form of skimming activity” jumping from one site to another and rarely going back to the pervious sites visited and reading no more than one or two pages of the article. Carr also points out that we may be reading more today than in the 1970’s or 1980’s but it’s a different kind of reading, and that could create a different kind of thinking.
Carr’s claim of how we are reading is important to me, because it bring awareness to me of what I could be missing if I am doing the skimming activity while I am reading. Also, now not having to spend the time to research books for information on materials, what I could be missing by just using the internet for the source of information. There is no deep reading involved or required by the internet to use the information, thus making it so I may not use my brain’s memory bank to store all the details of the article, since it is easily available to go back to when necessary.
The evidence that Carr’s uses is; by talking to other colleagues, they also stated “they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing” with the more they use the Web. Carr also goes back to centuries ago writings from Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates feared that, “as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” This is a good form of evidence to use, because he is not just stating his thoughts, but thoughts of other people. Both are from today’s society and from society years ago.
Therefore, Carr provides ample evidence that the depth of our reading is deteriorating with the use of the internet, Sven Birkerts article “The Owl Has Flown”, also relates to the “gradual displacement of the vertical by the horizontal to reading, a shift from intensive to extensive reading,” which convinces me that we are losing the depth to our reading. By not doing extensive reading or going back to reread the material to get the full meaning and understanding of what is being said, I am not gaining any knowledge or depth to the material. When skimming through news headlines, I may acquire parts of the story, but not all the facts to the story. Ample time is needed to absorb information, and it should not be a hurried process to use when trying to learn new information.