This week's blog post is in response to both Mike Featherstone's article Theory, Culture and Society and David Carr's semi-provocatively titled piece Is Google Making Us Stupid?
I really liked reading both of these articles. They were both very thorough and yet succinct at the same time, although Carr's piece felt like it may have left some loose ends untied.
Speaking of Carr's article, I see where he's coming from with his argument that the internet is in some way tinkering with our brains and our memories. However, I view this phenomenon in a different way that I don't believe he really touched on.
The internet isn't destroying our brains or our memories as much as it is just changing how we retain information as well as what we are more likely to retain.
The human brain seems to be more likely to remember information that it took a lot of effort to track down (i.e. spending hours in a library combing through stacks and poring over a book). With the advent of Google and the rest of the internet's database of information, the entire concept of "tracking down" information has become pretty much obsolete.
We take the internet for granted in the assumption that it will always be there with us. Knowing a vast wealth of information is always going to be available at our very fingertips, we are less inclined to remember anything knowing that we can always easily look it up in the exact same spot in cyberspace later on with little to no effort on our part whatsoever. Carr kind of glossed over this in favor of writing about how the internet is shortening everyone's attention spans this way.
That's is for this week. I won't have a blog post next week because I don't have one due over the week of spring break. I leave you with a link to a brand new blog that I am a coauthor of with classmate Taylor Reed. This is for my big semester project in my Digital Journalism class. This makes five blogs that I now am expected to maintain. So long!
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