For this week’s assigned reading, I would like to focus on Chapter 4 of What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. When I first began reading the chapter, I was confused yet interested in how Nicholas Carr had started. I didn’t understand why Nicholas Carr had spent more than half the chapter explaining how writing and books were first developed, but towards the end I had finally realized why. Nicholas Carr had wanted to stress the importance of books, and explaining how technology and the internet in our society today is slowly taking over. Throughout the chapter, there were many things I had agreed with and found interesting.
The first statement I had found interesting was on page 61 where young children had begun writing by running their words together. The second interesting fact was on page 62 where Carr mentions how reading a book back in the days became “less an act of performance and more a means of personal instruction and improvement.” This today is a problem because I believe that less and less people are beginning to pay attention to reading books compared to the 1900’s. Now people are either paying attention to the internet, their phone, or their computer. Finding people reading books now is much harder than it used to be. Technology now has become so advanced that a book can now be turned into a kindle or nook where you could just download the whole story through the internet. The third interesting fact is on page 63 where Carr mentions how when we read books, we shift our gaze and our attention from one object to another, becoming more aware of our surroundings. This is very true especially when I read a book because I get distracted by noises from outside very easily when I’m reading. I noticed that I give more attention to my surroundings as opposed to the book I’m reading. The fourth fact in the book I found interesting was on page 76 where Carr explains how many momentous intellectual achievements wouldn’t have been possible without reading and writing. I agree with this because reading and writing is what gives us human beings the intellectual thoughts and ideas. Now that people are beginning to pay more attention to technology and the internet today, this could be a problem. Nowadays instead of people going to the library searching for information, everyone just goes straight to Google. I wonder if our future, people are only going to depend on the search engine Google for everything they need to look up.