Comparing “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “a Life of the Senses”

Throughout the course of history, technology has changed us. It gave us a way to communicate in long distances. It gave us a way to produce goods faster and more efficiently. And it gave us the convenience to acquire knowledge with just one click of a button. However, there are bad effects as there are good. Nicolas Carr’s â€Å"Is Google Making Us Stupid? † and Richard Louv’s â€Å"A Life of the Senses†, discusses the different effects of technology on people. Carr’s essay, â€Å"Is Google Making Us Stupid? discusses technology’s effect in our way of thinking, while Louv’s essay, â€Å"A Life of the Senses† discusses the change in our lifestyle and our senses. From the get go, Carr says that â€Å"†¦I’ve had an uncomfortable feeling that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neutral circuitry, reprogramming my memory† (1). Sure enough, it actually has been. Most of us probabl y have had this feeling; a feeling like something was off. It becomes more apparent when we try to read a long essay, or a novel.We sit around and read a few paragraphs or a few pages, but not for long we â€Å"†¦begin looking for something else to do† (1). We come to realize that we can’t concentrate, we feel impatient and we find ourselves staring at an LCD screen, or maybe an LED screen, doing what we usually do: nothing. When a question arises about that essay we were about to read, we push a few keys, click a few link and voila! Here is a whole page in which we will exercise more of our laziness. We then start to wonder what causes this.Surprisingly, one of our most important means of communication and source of information is causing this. The Net, is chipping away our capacity for concentration and contemplation (1). Louv refers to this in his essay as the â€Å"know-it-all state of mind† (667). We browse and browse and browse and we skim everything we see. We want to acquire information and we want it immediately. This want to acquire information as fast as we can load the page, becomes a habit and changes us into something like the very machine we use to get all of this information.We are turned into something like our favorite search engine. It can get you answers fast, but it doesn’t understand any of it. As Louv and Carr would say, we are skimming at the surface but we don’t penetrate vertically. (667, 1) It’s scary to know that the Net made us developed a habit that turns us into robots, but it’s much scarier when we find out that it’s actually changing the way we think. We seek maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output just likeTaylor’s system mentioned in Carr’s essay. This system was created to boost production in factories, and is still used even now. It did us a lot of good economically, but without even noticing, this system has wormed its way to our brain s and made it our philosophy, or, as Louv quoted from Daniel Yankelovich, our religion. This faith is taking over our minds. It’s making us stupid in terms of our depth of understanding, but it doesn’t end there. The Net or technology as a whole is changing the way we live.Long ago, before the inventions of portable gadgets, people used to look out the car window, people used to go out with friends and kids used to play outside and exercise their imaginations, but now technology has changed everything. Instead of looking out in the horizon people stare at their small radioactive devices, throwing birds that need counseling at pyramids of sticks and stones built by green mutated pigs. Instead, of going out with friends they try and fit all their thoughts and feeling into a box that can only contain one hundred forty letters.Instead of playing outside they stay inside watching television, tinkering with their gaming consoles, and or trying to win the title â€Å"heavies t kid on earth. † People are missing out on all of the good things the outside world can give us. Their missing out the kind of fun I felt when my siblings and I played â€Å"Whoever counts the most cow wins. † I miss those days, and sure enough we’re all going start looking for it. And when we do, businesses are going to be there to â€Å"provide† you with a quick and easy way to fulfill this need.Industries soon get profit from â€Å"concocted nature† even when we can get it for free. We fall for it anyways, because even if the â€Å"nature† we see is just a simulation our brain thinks that it’s fine. Synthetic or real, it doesn’t matter, and I suspect that the system embedded in our brains is the cause of this. When we start to feel that we want something, we automatically think that we want it now, and the closest thing that can give fulfill this need is our computer, or, if were up to it, the mall. It’s just a much f aster and more efficient way to fulfill the current task.On the other hand, when we start looking at artificial nature we start to lose our appreciation and understanding for actual nature. For example, before all of the images of the Grand Canyon people used to at it in awe. They would explore it, admire it and speculate how all of it came about, but now, we take a picture, post it in a social media site, caption it with half-hearted praises and since there’s nothing more to see or say we turn around and drive away. We saw it and now it’s time to leave, just like another webpage. The system digs even deeper.To obtain something, you must first lose something. In this case, to obtain information faster we must lose our traditional way of learning by experience. As Louv quotes Edward Reed, â€Å"We are beginning ‘to lose the ability to experience our world directly. What we have come to mean by the term experience is impoverished; what we have of experience in dai ly life is impoverished as well’† (670). We rely so much on the information we know from the Net that we think we can do anything, well, as long as we can search the instructions online, or we can watch how to, via online streaming.We become uninterested in actually doing something, since we already â€Å"know† how to. We are left in the dark on how something actually works, because we don’t really need more than knowing how to turn something on. As a result, the most important means of gathering information is now missing. However, just like Carr and Louv I think that some of us are focusing on the negatives too much. We have exponentially advanced in terms of production, distribution, processing information and a lot more.My grandmother survived cancer because of technology, and God, knows that the internet has helped me many times in homework’s and projects. It’s the primary tool for students after all, well that and the library. Neverthel ess, it’s definitely not all bad. There may be some possibilities that we are turning into robots, but there may also be more chances that we’re just changing into something better. One can develop a machine to process information and someday it may be able to fully understand it, but people are not machines.We can process information and we can understand them; it’s just that we developed a certain affinity of getting what we need first rather than understanding. I think of it a testing period for a prototype of the perfect machine, but this time it’s a prototype of a perfect way of thinking. We may find a way to get something fast and fully understand it in the future, but for now we are evolving. If you still think that we are turning into nothing more than computer, always remember that computers can never feel, and no matter what we humans do, we will always feel.