[Emerald]

Recently I stumbled on one rather curious article written by Nicolas Carr. His main statement there is that surfing the Internet the way we all do nowadays has significant impact on the way we perceive information from other soursces. He is saying: What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. "My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." He says that since people start to spend more time online they lose their ability for a deep reading, lose their ability to concentrate on one subject. All hyperlinks, ads we get when we open an Internet page scatter our attention. He also refers to a five-years research conducted by University College London reporting that there are new forms of reading such as “horizontally reading through headlines and titles”, using a kind of cross reading as a result he stated that people adapt online way of reading when reading a book.

He also pointing that the Internet effects our thoughts: He is pointing out that “media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.” The conclusion I got from the article is when losing the ability to read deeply we are losing the ability to think deeply.
I wonder is it really so? Doesn’t he exaggerate, does it seem to be paranoia? Yes, I noticed that I do cross reading from time to time while surfing or searching the Internet but it’s because the content is’t worth reading. When I come across an interesting stuff I read it properly. It is still a bliss for me to curl up in an armchair with a book for several hours and immerse myself into a book’s world . Maybe it is simply a problem of Internet’s content and not our ability to concentrate and to read deeply?
Carr is saying that the Internet is changing out ability to think. It’s true that the Internet contains of billions bytes of different information not always reliable and and it’s a power source for brain washing the same as TV. But I think that these are people who fill the Internet with information and make it as it is. So I believe that it’s we who influence the Internet and not the Internet that influence us. We always have the right to choose what information to accept.
So what do you think is Internet making us stupid? Does it influence you the way the author sees it?

[Serenity]

Emerald, on 18 September 2010 - 06:21 PM, said:

Recently I stumbled on one rather curious article written by Nicolas Carr. His main statement there is that surfing the Internet the way we all do nowadays has significant impact on the way we perceive information from other soursces. He is saying: What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. "My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." He says that since people start to spend more time online they lose their ability for a deep reading, lose their ability to concentrate on one subject. All hyperlinks, ads we get when we open an Internet page scatter our attention. He also refers to a five-years research conducted by University College London reporting that there are new forms of reading such as “horizontally reading through headlines and titles”, using a kind of cross reading as a result he stated that people adapt online way of reading when reading a book.

He also pointing that the Internet effects our thoughts: He is pointing out that “media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.” The conclusion I got from the article is when losing the ability to read deeply we are losing the ability to think deeply.
I wonder is it really so? Doesn’t he exaggerate, does it seem to be paranoia? Yes, I noticed that I do cross reading from time to time while surfing or searching the Internet but it’s because the content is’t worth reading. When I come across an interesting stuff I read it properly. It is still a bliss for me to curl up in an armchair with a book for several hours and immerse myself into a book’s world . Maybe it is simply a problem of Internet’s content and not our ability to concentrate and to read deeply?
Carr is saying that the Internet is changing out ability to think. It’s true that the Internet contains of billions bytes of different information not always reliable and and it’s a power source for brain washing the same as TV. So what do you think is Internet making us stupid? Does it influence you the way the author sees it?

Hello everybody!
I am a new registered member here and am just brousing some topics, that seem interesting to me.
I would like to say that i completely agree with the author's opinion concerning the serfing the Internet: "So I believe that it’s we who influence the Internet and not the Internet that influence us. We always have the right to choose what information to accept". It makes stupid only people who blindly copy the info for writing some sorts of paper works instead of gathering the material, think it over and organise it using their own vision and understanding. So do not let anybody wash your brain, impose on some ideas that contradict common sense.
Best wishes!

[Emerald]

Hello, Serenity!
welcome on the forum and thanks for considering my topic to be interesting.

PS- nice name btw.

[Prolya]

I know exactly that internet has a big influence for me, for my concentration and contemplation, but, may be in another sense.

I have a friend; he is nearly 40 years old, he is from Siberia, his first degree is a French teacher. One day he tells me about his study: how difficult it was to find out some information, translation, learning material. They had stayed at the library all days and sometimes read a lot of books so as to find some word translation. edit the last 3 words for grammar They had gathered information with hardly and they treated with it the other way (there is a lot of concentration and contemplation).
1 misused article

Now we don’t know about this, it is easy to find out the information and to lose it.

[solar prominence]

I noticed that it's difficult to concentrate when you work with the Internet. You are trying to do several things at the same time. You check your mail, your facebook/vkontakte/etc profile again and again. It's a very bad habit and I fight against it telling myself: "If somebody needs me, he/she will PHONE".
It's much easier to concentrate when you read a real book. But sometimes when I do it my fingers are looking for "CTRL" and "F" keys to find something. And when I do or say smth wrong, I have a huge wish to press CTRL+ALT+DEL. The Internet teaches us to forget information (because we can always find it again) and not to be afraid of mistakes (because we can always correct them).
Of course, there are a lot of advantages of using the Internet. I don't want to write about it because you know it; i'll write only two things - 1) I've found Westley in the Internet and 2) I've found my ex-classmate vkontakte and she learns english with me now =)
The Internet is a very good and a very bad technology at the same time. It is like the nuclear-power engineering. In the middle of the XX-th century we didn't have a culture of using it, it was like a petard in a child's hands, so there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Caribbean crisis. Now we've learned how to use it (I hope).
At least one generation should change ours when humanity will learn to use the net properly. Our parents didn't know about the internet addiction. We know about it and when I will become a mother I'll try to protect my child from this addiction like our parents were protecting us from drugs. And everything will be ok 8)

This post has been edited by solar prominence: 01 October 2011 - 10:16 PM

[Cheetah]

I think that one of the reasons people are using the Internet in such a way is much much deeper than the author mentioned in the article. It seems to me that people usually go to the Internet and gather some information not because they're really very interested in the subject they're reading about. If you were looking through headlines and found something that might be interesting you will read new information in the same subliminal way.

To my mind one of the reasons of skin-deep learning is that people can't learn such a huge amount of information that became available just in the last 5-6 years.
And the second reason is because of the way of using the Internet on a regular basis: it's almost always used for fun - not for learning. People who are trying to make their knowledge deeper in some particular subject are the vast minority of those who are using the Internet. That's the reason they don't have much influence on the statistic.

This post has been edited by Cheetah: 15 October 2011 - 10:00 AM

[Maladict]

Cheetah makes a valid point. I'd take it even further: the vast majority of those using the Internet should never have learned to read in the first place. There is certainly something to be said for selective education. Having never learned to acquire or value information makes Jack and Jill tumble down the hill even faster than in all the centuries preceding this one.