To Be or Not To Be Stupid - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages Claudia Wallis in her article, “The Multitasking Generation,”(2006) and Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”(2008) argue against the way people interact and rely upon the technology physically, emotionally, mentally, and socially in certain unpleasant ways. In his personal life, Carr describes a lesser ability to concentrate. He focuses upon the intellectual laziness that access to fast internet answers, the mobile phone, and other technology can breed mental laziness. He goes back into history to show how the coming of technology can have negative effects upon the human mind, from the 14th century onwards, though the industrial revolution and on into the modern age, with an ever-growing negative impact.
Wallis focuses instead more on the social and interpersonal communicational perspective when people are persistently interacting and multitasking with technology, and how that these can have a negative effect; both of these authors are absolutely right.
She discusses how children are perpetually interacting with technology and that parents think that this multitasking is a product and a credit to the presence of that technology and their minds. Unfortunately, that is little better than an “old wives tale” that people may tell themselves to justify their children’s excessive technological interactions:-
Human beings have always had the capacity to attend to several things at once. Mothers have done it since the hunter-gatherer era--picking berries while suckling an infant, stirring the pot with one eye on the toddler” (Wallis 2006). ...Download file to see next pagesRead More