Kevin Conroy
English 100, Kearney: Paper 1
9/10/14
"Google-ly Eyes"
Since 2008, it feels like every person I see has either an Iphone or Android. Whether we are just trying to talk to our friends across the city, or trying to find research for a certain class, social technology and its interactions may be leading us to stupider and stupider generations of Americans. In "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", Nicholas Carr explains how having all of these new internet sites, pop ups, and distractions on either our phones or computers can be giving common internet users too much hyper focus brain activity. Since a lot of us smart phone consisting people cannot go for more than a few minutes without checking our phone for updates, or clicking on random pop ups on the internet, we are losing touch with our deep focus attentive minds. Carr is warning us that without this deep focus brain activity, we will be slower and uncaring when we have real world jobs with international business to do, or even trying to just read more than a few paragraphs.
However, I disagree with Carr on the idea that we are getting stupider, but rather the opposite, we are getting smarter. In fact, for as long as humans have existed, we as a species have just adapted or gotten smarter when faced with dilemmas such as an ice age, running out of food, or coming across other civilizations. Author of "Get Smarter", James Cascio gives us many different situations to where the human species has had to adapt/change their ways of thinking to survive with the world that happens beyond our hometowns. Just how right now in time, Americans are learning to adapt and live with all of the new ways to find research online,