Relying on the Internet

    Jake Sulzer  

       In Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows, he tries to get the point across to the readers that the internet is altering the way we think. From his findings, he believes that our attention spans are not what they used to be and that the internet is to blame for this. With such an efficient medium at our disposal why would we spend time reading books and newspapers? All of this can be done online in a quicker way.
       As someone who grew up with the internet I know how valuable it is as a medium for information. That being said, I also understand how it is changing the way we think. When I was younger, around eight years old, I couldn't function a computer very well. I hardly knew how to get online and look things up and because of that I rarely used the internet. I spent most of my time reading books if I wasn't at school or with friends. As I grew older and older I began to use the internet more frequently. The more I used the internet, the more I discovered everything it was capable of. All the information I could ever need at my fingertips. I could look up a summary of a book and finish it in five minutes, watch movies online, see what my friends were doing.
      Everything became so easy I just began to wish everything was that easy. In school I had trouble studying because it required reading chapters and chapters of information from textbooks. I couldn't tell at the time what was happening but now I can noticeably tell that my attention span has gone down significantly. I get bored whenever I have to do the slightest amount of reading, including the assigned reading for this book. I can get through about half a chapter before wishing I could just use SparkNotes to figure out the rest of what he is saying. I guess I am a prime example of how the internet is changing our brains.