Is internet making us dumber - Essay Example

IS THE INTERNET MAKING US DUMBER? Technology and its developments have had significant impact on humanity with electronic devices, multimedia and computers being part of most people’s daily lives. The internet, as part of the technological advancements, has vastly become most people’s number one priority for information. Search engines such as Google facilitate the access of all the information advocating for efficiency and immediacy. Nonetheless, the internet has its pros and cons but most people do not take time to evaluate how this medium influences their lives.

Resolutely, this essay focuses on evaluating how the internet affects the human cognition making people dumber by agreeing to ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr’ and with evidence supporting the arguments. Definitely, the internet is platform when people can easily access the information through their smartphones or laptop; however, the constant retrieval of information online has a negative influence on people’s cognition. Nicholas Carr’s theory that the internet scatters people’s attention and diffuses their concentration is rational (Carr, 2008).

As an influence of the immediacy and efficiency factors, most people reading online material have lower rates of concentration, understanding, captivation and recollection as compared to the customary ways of retrieving information from books, journals and other print sources. The depth of online material is the key contributor to this. The skim reading and scanning of online materials has people accessing multiple documents at the same time hence giving each divided attention despite the fact that the brain cannot process it.

Search engines such as Google facilitate the opening of multiple windows by the user (Carr, 2008). This has people researching, checking emails, reading the news and accessing their social media pages simultaneously. This acts as a distraction affecting their comprehension of the significant information. The provision of many hyperlinks on similar information, most people tend to compare context from different websites even when they have not comprehensively understood what they acquired from the first.

People read might read faster and selectively as requirements for vast access of information from the internet but end up forgetting most of the information read. People are more attentive when reading from print sources because it is harder to find specific information from books, journals or newspapers. In the past, people would conduct a research for months to avoid missing any relevant information; moreover, reading through books and acquiring the right was hard. Today, people print out only the documents or information they depict as significant.

The easy access of the internet gives them the guarantee that they can access the information they did not print again. Moreover, with people looking forward to more advanced inventions such as the ‘Perfect Search Engine’, the issue could get worse with people putting less effort in comprehension or absorption of information (Carr, 2008).The impact of the internet on people’s cognition goes both ways; negative and positive but with findings from studies and research, the negative influences could overpower the positive.

Most students today avoid the long chunks of information since the internet has summaries and synopsis as the shorter versions and with time, the bar will lower making people dumber and dumber.ReferencesCarr, N. 2008, Is Google Making Us Stupid. The Atlantic Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/