The Juggler's Brain

In chapter 7, The Juggler's Brain, Carr brings further pushes his idea that the internet has changed the way our minds think. Instead of being able to read an article and think deeply, we are quickly swept away to another link-- another article, and are left no time to ponder what we have just read. It is easy to become consumed and spend hours Googling random information or watching cat videos on YouTube. Hours.

This addiction to the internet has become an epidemic that I believe has spurned some antisocial behavior. Take the popular website Netflix. As of January 2014, Netflix had 44 million subscribers. And yet, Netflix itself is not a social media network. That is a lot of users for a website that is ultimately a very solitary activity. Just as it is easy to spend hours watching YouTube videos, it's even easier to spend more hours binge watching Netflix. Over Spring Break I was sick and spent Friday and Saturday in bed. During that time, I watched 23 episodes of the show Veronica Mars (judge me now). Each episode is about 40 minutes long. I'm average enough at math to know that this certainly meets the criteria of binge watching a television show.

We are constantly juggling so much information, it is difficult to process. During the time I was watching all these episodes, of course I was on my phone playing Scramble with friends, on twitter, and scrolling through tumblr. I'd look back at the screen 20 minutes later, thinking I would have some idea of what was going on in that episode since I had been listening to it in the background, and yet, I was completely lost and would have to rewind (or whatever you would call that on Netflix...) back to the spot I was at before I became transfixed on my phone. Was I able to process or deeply think about the television show as I was jumping from one app on my phone to the other? Obviously not since I had to start the episode over. The internet has created a society great in multitasking, but how great at that multitasking exactly are we? Is the multitasking strictly surface level? The chart below shows just how much our age group (16-24) "multitasks" with all our different media activities.

Nicholas Carr p. 1-57

Carr writes about his ideas on how the internet is effecting us-- yet he does so in a more creative way then we've seen in previous readings. He weaves funny anecdotes into his chapters and the reading seems very much engaging. He feels that the internet is changing the brain--reprograming the memory. The internet has caused a shift in the attention span of all who so normally use it. The internet has changed the way we pay attention to things; research that was previously lengthy and time consuming can be resolved with a quick Google search. I think also that the invention of the smart phone has greatly changed the way people think and interact. It's so easy to look something up on my phone that I don't even really have to think about it much. The internet doesn't just give us things to think about, it changes the way we think. I think that since I've always grown up using the internet and the computer, it is much different than with older generations. I think my brain has been wired differently from the start, while people like Carr are more able to see the shift since he went many decades without having used the internet.

I completely agree with what Carr and his peers are saying about how the internet has changed specifically how we read. The internet is so fast paced and there is so much information out there, yet we quickly click out of an article if it's too long. We skim internet articles, and we then skim readings for school. It's hard to comprehend this new information. There's an email subscription that is actually called TheSkimm.com. Every day they will email you just the basic more important things that happened in the news that day. Nothing is longer than a paragraph; it's just enough information to the the point across. This service epitomizes what Carr is talking about with skimming. Below is an image of one of an example of an email The Skimm sent out before. I'm not sure if it's necessarily a bad thing...it's kind of like Twitter. Things are being condensed so more information can be sent out and processed. Since the internet is changing our brains..the internet must change in order to conform to it.

Baron, Chatper 11: The Dark Side of the Web

The web really can be a dark place. Baron's chapter 11 discusses at length how dark cyberspace can be. Almost like a black hole. Children can easily be subjected to unwanted pornographic images at an unwanted age just from a simple Google search of a seemingly innocent term. I would say that over the years since I have grown up on the internet, Goggle has put in place many different types of blocking tools to stop this subjection-- but it still happens.

The internet is full of online predators, bullies, hackers, and other evil do-ers. I'm a member of the popular website Tumblr (and it's the website I did my social media project on), and while I've never received a hatefully bullying message, I've seen plenty of members receive them without really any incentive except to be mean. I've read anonymous messages commenting about people's weight, looks, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and so much more. What truly baffles me is why do they do it? Why hide behind a computer screen and torment someone you don't even know-- or someone you do know? In lieu of recent cyberbullying cases, young teenagers have committed suicide due to the bullying they have received over the internet. It is deeply saddening and I truly feel laws should be put in place for it to stop. I think anonymous feature on Tumblr messaging should be removed and Facebook should be stricter about online bullying or more serious about their "report" feature. Below I found a report about cyberbullying and it was extremely disturbing just how high the students reported they had been bullied online.

Another dark side of the internet is called "the deep web." I was never even aware that it was a thing until a recent Time magazine article I read. I was shocked. Especially by a website called "The Silk Road" where users can buy and sell drugs, prostitutes, and murder using their own form of money called bitcoins. It is so hard to police these types of things because people are so intelligent with the internet now. A seemingly normal young man ran this whole operation, when he could have been using his intelligence with technology for good. 

The internet can be a dark place, but you have to avoid it. I think in any situation this remains true. Don't feed into negativity-- unfriend, block, or even if you have to remove yourself from the website, you need to do it.