Summary:

Carr from the start shares with the audience his personal problem: he can’t focus on reading.

“Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, and begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

So what he is saying with the article is that the internet is supposed to help browsing for information faster and more profitable than say going to the library. He explains that we are losing in the shift from using the internet as our primary source for information. He uses a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey which he identifies easier and faster with the computer rather than the robotic human. This clues us in that perhaps using the internet is going to make us more machine minded, perhaps even more than the actual machines themselves.

Response:

First off I want to say this has probably been my favorite reading we have done so far. Not because how easy it was to read, but because I was able to relate to it the easiest. As a person growing up in the computer age I understand computers and how the internet works. With that being said I fully agree with what Carr is saying, the way we read, think, and write is by far a lot different than how it used to be without the Internet, things are a lot shorter, faster, and not as deep. Carr nails it when he says we are becoming more machine like, because if you think about it, we are constantly using machines now to aid us in writing. When do we ever write a book, essay, research paper, you name it by pen and paper? All of our sources are from an Internet search.

Reflect:

I think this work can really help my writing because it pinpoints our writing and reading weaknesses. Many of us (I for one) don’t have attention span to sit and read a huge article, we like to skip around. I have to force myself to sit there and read the article multiple times. This text allows me to see those flaws and with a better understanding of them I can make those “weaknesses” strengths. With this text in mind I am going to try to read “deeper” articles and works, this way I hope make myself better at reading and going deeper into certain works, because with a better understanding of that, writing will only be easier.