Internet Quarrel

When the internet was introduced to the world it seemed as though it was a knight in shining armor. Now it seems the way we read and react to what we had read has changed from the level it was once at. Clive Thompson a published author who wrote “Public Thinking” argues for the internet and believes that its strengths far outway its weaknesses. Thompson claims that the internet has enhanced our cognitive behavior. He proclaims that the internet has brought us into a literary revolution as substantial as the one that had taken place in Ancient Greece. Contrary to Thompson are Nicholas Carr and Michael S. Rosewald both established professionals claiming that the internet is impairing us. Carr is the author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” in which he argues that the internet has been taking away from our capacity for concentration and contemplation. He suggests that with the easy access to vasts amounts of knowledge at your fingertips that people will lose the connection with the material they are researching and not fully comprehend what they had just read. With all the distractions and temptations to move from site to site has formed a sort shallow way of thinking about subjects. Rosewald is the author of “Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say,” which targets the way people go about reading online information. Online information is geared toward simplicity and tend to be a lot less to read. Information we find in

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books and hard copy materials do not follow this path. Rosewald argues that we are losing the ability to comprehend material containing multiple key arguments and ideas because we are becoming accustomed to information being almost spoon fed to us through online websites. In this paper I will elaborate on and challenge Thompson, extend Carr, and expand on Rosewald with my own argument.

Thompson writes of fantastic claims in his text about how the internet has increased cooperation between working professionals and how writing for an audience will propel students to write with more creativity and logic. The connections made by these working professionals will result in new inventions or new partnerships between industries but the connections made by everyday people are on twitter or facebook and not advancing society in any direction. One the experiments thompson noted in his text was done by a Stanford English professor, Andrea Lunsford, and over the course of five years she collected nearly fifteen thousand pieces of writing from 189 students whether it was from social media or for classes. She concluded that 40 percent of everything they wrote was pleasure and that, “They’re writing so much more than students before them ever did… It’s stunning” (Thompson 51). This study was based off of students that go to one of the most prestigious academic schools in the world. Their writing capabilities are arguably more profound than that of the regular person. When the internet is used by someone who is capable of connecting beyond the social standpoint and uses the internet as one of their many tools than it is a substantial resource. Sadly for most this is not true. Time and time again the internet has become a distraction for many students in class and outside of the

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classroom. The lack of effort given in the classroom today has in part come from the advancement of the internet.

Carr believes that even though the internet has many redeeming qualities it has weaknesses that outweigh them as of right now. The way we have adapted to taking information off the internet has descended the level at which we retain written information. Carr quotes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, “Bowman... coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its brain” (Carr 58).He then goes on to state that he himself is having a hard time remembering what he had read in passages from books these days and how something that use to come naturally such as deep reading has become a struggle. The internet has vastly changed the way we read and comprehend knowledge today by serving the answers to our questions to us on a silver platter and thus eliminating the need for people to find out any of the underlying information. The hinderance of concentration and contemplation is what Carr argues to be overlapping all other positive features of the internet. Carr explained that we only see the surface of the topics we research due to the way the internet pushes out its information and the amounts of information it pushes out each and every day. Carr quotes Maryanne Wolf, a professor from Tufts University and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, stating that, “We are not only what we read… we are how we read” (Carr 60). What Wolf fears is that when we read online we become “mere decoders of information” and no longer engage that deep thought that connects with and engages the texts on a different level. The way we are reading today is no longer for books or long texts but for the internet article. Since entering high school years ago the internet has had a big impact on my academic career. From

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watching math tutor videos on youtube or looking up definitions on dictionary.com, the internet has made books almost obsolete in my eyes. I see now that when I take up a book and attempt to read it, I find I have a lack of concentration and remembrance of what I had just read and so I end up rereading it. Compared to the internet which gives you the information you seek right in front of you, when using books you have to dissect the information to find what you are looking for. This ability I find to be hard for  many people today and almost every time they would rather search something on the internet instead of looking for it manually in a book. For me and other students reading books has almost become obsolete with the the availability of written summaries online of  any book you can think of. I find that a connection made through reading a novel is lost when i use the internet to look up a summary of certain chapters because I did not want to read the book. I personally do not use social media all that often compared to other students my age because I prefer to talk to people face to face. So my writing skills and collaboration skills through the internet have not really been affected other than me using the internet for writing papers. I find that many people today do not think before they act, or really think at all for that matter. The lack of common sense in people my age today is astounding and I believe that the increased reliability on the internet has to do with it.

Aligning with Carr’s argument is Rosewald’s. He agrees with Carr in that the internet is handicapping our generation’s comprehensive reading ability. With more time spent today online than on paper students are leaning more toward using the internet than paper. “The students believed they did better on screen. They were wrong. Their comprehension and learning was better on paper” (Rosewald 1). With all the time spent today by students and adults on the

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computer it is easy to see why we are more comfortable with the internet copy of a text rather than a hard copy. Sadly though accompanying the online copy is the style of reading we perform now with it. Skipping and skimming from one page to the next. Adversely, the reading we do when we use a hard copy is more in depth and concentrated. I proclaim that as a result of all the surfing done on the internet we are left now only recognizing what is written on top per se and not throughout the text. Claire Handscombe a graduate student at American University that Rosewald interviewed stated, “It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again” (Rosewald 1). This quote supports my claim about remembrance in that it has been lacking in recent years. With all the reading going on today, why should we settle for only partially comprehending a text?

The internet has come a long ways but it still has a ways to go. Thompson is not wrong in that the internet has helped us a great deal with making connections and writing skills. For now though the claims made by Carr and Rosewald carry more weight to them. The cognitive skills being damaged by the shallow online reading is becoming more and more present in individuals. The internet is a great resource for us but we need to learn how to use it properly and then it will truly bring us into an entire new field of cognitive and contemplative abilities.