1.      Questions

·         How does the internet affect a person’s ability to concentrate?

·         Has the internet had an effect on a person’s desire to read books?

·         What kind of style of reading has the internet created over time?

2.      Response

In the article Is Google Making Us Stupid?, by Nicholas Carr, he touches on the idea that the internet has a substantial and negative effect on a person’s ability to concentrate. People have lost the ability to read novels or long internet articles due to extensive use of the Net. When we do have to read, we actually are not reading, we are skimming and skipping through sentences. Instead of reading an entire article on the internet, people tend to just read the headings and the bullets to get the “gist” of it. As a growing society, we are always wanting information and we want it fast. Once we have found the information needed, it is on to the next new question that we want answered immediately. As an avid user of the internet, I have also noticed my decreased ability to concentrate on long articles, or novels. Growing up I loved to read and overtime, I have lost the ability to sit down and read a book because it “takes too long”.  

While the internet may play a part in decreasing a person’s ability to concentrate, Nicholas Carr fails to consider positive effects of the Net. While some scientists and people believe that clicking on multiple sites and skimming through each article is “dumbing” us down, others believe that it actually has some benefits. Skimming, stopping to process the information, opening different tabs to compare and contrast articles can be a good thing. This makes a person an active reader, forcing them to think and to engage in all of the information they are reading. Although they are not reading every single word in the article or they are reading out of order, this still calls for complex thinking and processing of information.