Draft

Tim Bergh

Instructor: E. Walroth

English 1301

7/8/2013

Catching Up

Although I did not know or hear about Google until in my forties while in the Navy, when the internet started all kinds of new adventures, because not being a big fan of electronics and video games, I grew up using the rotary phone and only had three channels on TV. I still vividly remember my first time using the computer. I never experienced anything like it. I felt as if this will open a lot of doors for the young and old.

I am fifty two years old now and retired going back to school and try a new career. I have had trouble doing a focused and ‘deep’ reading. I always hated reading books, frankly until this day. After reading Nicholas Carr’s article ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid,’ I feel as though I know whom to blame now. Carr starts the article saying that “the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”. Obviously, I wouldn’t know about this because I was never able to read deeply enough to say that Google change the way I read. Carr does not focus merely on the way people read in result of using Google, but he also states that it changes the process of thought. Carr makes a reference to Wolf’s ‘Proust and the Squid’ about the fact that “we are how we read.” Different medium of reading affects the way we think. Also, when the way that we think is affected, who we are as persons is affected inevitably. The article contains the study that shows people tend to skim when they read online. The way we read has changed. Therefore, we are different people from who we might have been without the invention of computer. Carr refers to Wolf’s article once more by writing that people who speak Chinese and people who speak English have different brains. This reference strengthens his assumption that how we read weights heavy significance on how we think and who we are.

People who read online are distracted and hindered from focusing deeply by pop-ups, advertisements, and...