Final Paper Rough Draft

Brett Stinson
Professor Werry
RWS 100
12/4/14

Final Paper

The evolution of the internet has brought so many new revolutionary aspects into what we think of writing and reading. It has opened up so many new forms of writing, such as social media and instant messaging, and even advance previous forms or writing to make them more appealing by allowing easy access to a larger audience.  Ever since the creation of the first web page there has been such a large leap for the evolution of the internet. Although the internet has become such a revolution in technology, there has been a debate as to whether the Internet has brought more good or more bad. Clive Thompson and Nicholas Carr wrote the articles “Public Thinking” and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” respectively, where the both discuss the argument of whether the internet has had an impact on our brains ability to function correctly. Both authors take very different sides in this argument as one discusses how the internet is an overall beneficial resource for reading and writing, while the other takes the side that the internet is an overall harmful resource for reading and writing. Despite both authors presenting very strong cases for the argument, I believe that the internet has become harmful to the way humans read and write. I came into the world as the massive internet landslide was reaching its peak and I have been immersed in the world of technology ever since. From this perspective I will present my own ideas on why the internet is so harmful to the way humans read and write and I will support my ideas with other texts and evidence.
Although the Internet has brought along a massive surge of new technology with it, many negative side effects have started to be noticed by many and have stirred up a very large debate. In 2008 an article was published onto The Atlantic webpage by writer Nicholas Carr entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr examines how the internet has created a decline in our everyday cognitive functions and has damaged our skills in reading and writing. He discusses mainly how the internet has deteriorated our mind and our level of concentration, this is a side effect from the constant jumping from page to page on the internet. While discussing this side effect of prolonged internet use, he brings up this comparison to the past and how media has retained the same negative side effects even before the internet has come into existence,
As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And 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 (Carr 2).
By comparing how the deteriorated concentration has been a side effect long before the internet became a large everyday tool, Carr has developed a case that even though media has always had this effect on the mind, the new constant role of the internet in our everyday lives has intensified the effects on the brain. Carr has experienced these very effects first hand in his anecdote at the beginning of his article where he makes a comparison of how the internet is “tinkering with [his] brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory”(Carr 1), he compares this the the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the supercomputer HAL is having his brain destroyed by the main character David Bowman. Carr is supported by a British writer by the name of Sarah Harris in her article “Too much internet use 'can damage teenagers' brains”, where she analyzes how prolonged use of the internet has created an increase in the amount of grey matter in our brains and how this “could affect their concentration and memory, as well as their ability to make decisions and set goals. It could also reduce their inhibitions and lead to ‘inappropriate’ behaviour”(Harris 1). She supports this claim with a study conducted by neuroscientists where they MRI’s to look at the difference in brain matter between those who use the internet very frequently compared to those who rarely use the internet. The teenagers that use the internet less had a substantial drop in the amount of grey matter evident in the brain while those who use it frequently have a large amount that could be the cause of the deteriorated level of concentration found by many avid internet users.
Although the internet has created a decline in our ability to concentrate, the internet also has some positive contributions to our sense of focus and concentration. In the chapter “Public Thinking” by Clive Thompson in his book Smarter Than You Think, he discusses how the internet has brought along more good than bad and the internet has provoked many to partake in actively writing in a community and discussing everyday topics over writing. One main topic he discusses in his text is what is known as the “Audience Effect”, this is the effect where the presentation of a larger audience will drive the writer to produce a more quality piece of work than if they had not had an audience at all, and this large audience is easily established in the forms of blogs and forums on web pages. Later on in his article he goes on to discuss how increased writing can improve the quality of memory with a early cognitive study,
“Early evidence came in 1978, when two psychologists tested people to see how well they remembered words that they’d written down compared to words they’d merely read. Writing won out. The people who wrote words remembered them better than those who’d only read them- probably because generating text yourself “requires more cognitive effort than does reading and effort increases memorability.”(Thompson 57)
With this study, you can conclude that from Thompsons text the positive effects of writing on memory and the increased amount of writing in our everyday lives due to the internet, the internet proves to have a positive impact on our memory. Despite the fact that the internet has such a large negative effect on our sense of concentration and focus, it has the potential to have a positive effect on our sense of memory through the deeper writing found in blogs and forums. In an article written by Howard Rheingold titled “Attention Literacy”, he addresses how the internet has had a negative correlation on the brain, but he states how our attention is something that can always be improved and with the correct discipline, the internet could potentially be a vital resource. He discusses how “Multitasking, or "continuous partial attention"... are not necessarily bad alternatives to focused attention”(Rheingold 1), this is the case as long as our attention is in the right place and not distracted by social media sites.
Beginning in the early 1990’s the Internet has been making constant improvements to fix glitches, bugs and to overall improve its performance, with this came social media and a wide variety of websites for our own amusement and entertainment. In recent years many people debate whether or not the Internet has more positive or negative effects on human cognitive functions. As a student living in the golden age of technology and the Internet, I find myself using the Internet more often as I have to do homework, write papers and research online. Although I do the majority of my schoolwork online, it is not the primary use of my computer. Since the 7th grade I have been a semi-active user of the internet and have always had the social media accounts for the newest websites. For the majority of my life I have been using the internet for both business and pleasure and with this I feel as though I am not at the top of my mental capacity. Just as the Internet has ads and popups, my brain constantly has new ideas and thoughts coming up that it is nearly impossible to focus on one thing sometimes. This can make doing homework challenging when I am one tab away from seeing what parties are going or go and watch funny videos on Youtube.
Although  the Internet has brought so many forms of distractions it has also brought with it more knowledge than any one human can retain. The age of the internet has brought an idea of constant knowledge of what is going on around the world, you can now open up your phone and find out what your friends are doing or even learn about what is going on in any country around the world via news websites and even on social media. There is one tool that has proven to be most useful part of the internet, the power of everlasting knowledge. Despite one of the main forms of pleasure on the internet is social media, websites such as Wikipedia has introduced the ability to nearly instantly find out information about essentially anything you want to know. I find myself going on wikipedia for elongated periods of time just reading about people, places and events in history. This has mainly only shown benefits in normal conversation as I have the ability to recall odd facts that happen to relate to the topic of the conversation.
With my own observations of how the Internet has impacted my life and how it is connected to my skills in reading and writing, I have come to believe that the internet has more negatives than it has positives. Despite the Internet providing the tools to learn about practically anything, with this great power comes great responsibility. Responsibility being the ability to retain your sense of focus and not fall to the depths of social media. Social Media has brought misuse to the internet by plaguing the good intentions that Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf had in mind when birthing the internet. Just by observing how I manage my time while on the internet doing schoolwork compared to my time management while doing work on paper. Although the Internet is predominantly composed of informative sites, online shopping to save time in your everyday life and educational sites to help users of all ages in assisting them comprehend practically any task, the power of social media blankets the shine of the useful resources of the internet.
Through analyzing the works of both Clive Thompson and Nicholas Carr in great depth and with my own personal experiences, the internet has had a large unfavorable effect on the way we read and write. This unfavorable effect is due to the internet being filled with distractions and it presents the information in a new way that is much different than the traditional way of learning as the internet gives information as fast as you can process it. While information is being presented in this way it causes the brain to work in that way while reading and this causes complications and leads to attention deficiency. Despite the internet bringing up many negative aspects, the internet shows much promise and with the precise discipline and attention the internet could potentially be a very valuable resource as it is basically the largest book of information in the world.