PLN #3

Bella Demiranda

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

PLN #3

Nicholas Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" matters to me because if something we are doing is making us think and act differently throughout our lives, like the Internet, we should try to decrease our time on that activity because we will soon get to a point where no one will be able to think the same, and most of the people will have a shorter attention span. I think that this article made a very good point on explaining how the Internet can start shutting down our minds because when people are reading a long blog/article, i.e."Is Google Making Us Stupid?", when we get bored of reading we will most likely stop reading and click on something else. Which is ironic because "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" was a really long article. For example, myself, when I was reading  this article I read around three paragraphs then stopped because I got distracted. Then I came back to it and did the same thing until I finished. Nicholas Carr also had a good point when writing this article because us humans are used to short, and to the point articles. So when we need to read descriptive text we sometimes skim the article, and some people even search what the article is about so they don’t have to read it. Since more and more updates are coming out for electronics, I think that in the future, people born in that generation will have everything they need at their fingertips. Like a larger variety of smart phones and online resources which will lead to more people with ADD and ADHD. Like Nicholas Carr said, “The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood.” What he means by that is that our brains can always change the way it thinks and works, and by the time we are adults our brain will massively change from the time we were born.  Some people might believe this article is true, others might think that the Internet won’t change the way anyone thinks or acts. I think that it is very possible that it can, but it depends how each individual uses their time on the Internet.