Assignment #3 (part 2)

Meg said...

Thesis:
Constant access to flashy ads, pop-ups, texts, daily blogs and short news clips have changed our thought process so that many people can no longer focus on longer texts, but depend upon gaining information in the forms that the internet provides.

Agree:
-“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” I can see this transformation even in myself. I am 19 years old, and I have undergone great changes in my attention span and ability to comprehend long pieces of text. I was better at reading long books when I was a child, because I hadn’t been exposed to the internet!
-The author mentions that the adult brain is malleable, and can be influenced to function differently at any time. I would have to agree. My brain is changing all the time, and I can notice the changes. I have certainly become less able to focus, especially on reading since I have started using the internet daily. My desire to memorize things has left me, because I know that I can look anything up that I need to know.

Disagree:
-“Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.” For some reason, I highly doubt that people are reading more today than in the 1970s and 1980s. It seems that back then people would have read a lot more books and newspapers, and even the Bible. The reading that people do today on the internet is basically just to answer emails or skim research articles. I don’t know anyone that will read a book on the computer, or really even a work of fiction. Over the weekend, I went to a book store with some friends. At first, they all went to look at the CDs, then travel guides, and finally we left. Out of five students, only two made a purchase at the book store. My friend bought a CD, and I bought a children’s book that I loved as a kid. None of us intended to go back to the dorms and sit down to a good book. It is a shame. We may be reading more, but it is not more meaningful.
-“In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can ‘access’ and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.”
I must disagree with this statement. The author seems to be summarizing the mission of Google, and may not necessarily agree with what he’s written at all. And so, I disagree with the statement, but not necessarily the author. While I agree that information is an important resource and access to it needs improvement, I’m not sure Google is handing this problem appropriately. In order for access to information to be better, underprivileged people need to be given access. Making computers and websites faster for people in developed countries doesn’t really help anything. It makes privileged people even lazier.

February 8, 2010 7:31 PM