http://www.stylist.co.uk/life/technology-vs-brain-the-power-of-memory#image-rotator-3

Read The Shallows  by Nicholas Carr


I used his work for an Internet essay paper I wrote for my last english class.

As Faust As You
   The internet is binary code that runs on voodoo and witchcraft. It has been said that if you say Linux backwards three times while facing a mirror in a darkened room, Beelzebub himself will appear (via a hyperlink, of course.) In the Bible, Satan took the form of a snake when he spoke to Eve in the Garden of Eden.  It’s no coincidence that as I  look under my desk, I see a lot of snake-like cables attached to the very same computer I’m typing this essay on. Geek Squad techs who dress like demented missionaries and drive black Nazi inspired vehicles, look more like Beelzebub’s IT department than they do a typical nerd.  LOL Cats, The People of Walmart, and Mark Zuckerberg are all soldiers in Satan’s army.  Take a close look at the cover of Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good For You (a book that sings the internet’s praises) and tell me that’s not a demonic looking figure proudly displayed front and center on a blood-red background (well, slightly off center). And does the title itself not speak to something Lucifer himself would say? The internet is a time-wasting, soul-taking, memory-sucking, imagination-steeling machine that was forged in the depths of Hell. And we love it. In all seriousness, it’s one of the greatest tools mankind ever made. It’s like an electronic Swiss Army knife.  But given the internet’s seemingly endless potential for advancing and promoting our worlds collective knowledge, we humans, more times than not, waste, distort, underestimate, and misuse its potential. And worst of all, we blindly ignore our dependence on it and its negative effect on progressive learning.


   Learning is an evolutionary process, and it’s labor intensive. The labor is what adds value to the experience. Lessons learned the hard way are usually those that mean the most to a person. Just ask a college student who had to pay for their own education. But the key to learning anything is all based in the lesson’s structure. Rarely does a child walk before it can crawl. The internet’s hidden weakness is rooted within what its users like most: its unlimited restriction and mind-blowing speed. The internet says, not only can you walk before you can crawl, but “here’s the keys to a Ferrari, go have some fun.” Nicholas Carr touches on this in his book The Shallows when he writes about hypertext, and how educators were sure it would revolutionize and speed up learning the learning experience. “Freed from the lockstep reading demanded by printed pages, readers would make all sorts of new intellectual connections among diverse texts,” in essence, taking structure out of a learning experience (126). Carr later points to several studies that provide data contrary to educators’ original expectations. Studies found hypertext readers jumping around, distracted and confused, unable to recall the same information traditional book readers were retaining (127).


   Pablo Picasso said “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” Traditional, every day, Google-this, Bing-that, net-surfing kills creativity. The ease in which any information can be found on the internet all but destroys all the grey area nuances a person is privy to while on an old-school, lo-tech information hunt. Genuine creativity lives and breeds in the grey areas of life. An internet search, is in essence, a high speed trip down a tunnel with blinders on. It’s fast. It’s effective, it’s extremely precise, and it filters out the grey. All things the creative mind loathes. Will children born in the digital age develop the same creative minds like that of Sir Isaac Newton or Pablo Picasso? Did Steve Jobs create a paradox in which the tools his creative mind gave birth to unknowingly stifle the imagination of its user? Time will tell. Newton’s third law states that for every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction. It would be safe to say that his law also relates to the evolution of the digital age and the subsequent de-evolution in mankind’s cognitive deep-thought learning process after extensive internet use. We’ve become so accustomed to skimming information at lightning speed, traditional information gathering forms like libraries and newspapers have fallen to the wayside. Reminiscent of the television viewer who refuses to get off the couch and change channels when the remote goes missing, we are stubborn in our dependence.


   In his book Everything Bad Is Good For You, author Steven Johnson describes the internet as the modern world’s go-to place for information via sources like Google (121). While statistically correct, what Johnson and others like him don’t see is the creativity-killing dependence each and every one of those searches has on its user. There is no need to dig for deeper information with an internet search. Just type in any subject, and whether it’s spelled correctly or not, Google will provide you with an answer. Fact-checkers need not apply. Google also eliminates failure, which is great, but we humans are hardwired to learn from failure. Type in “should I touch a hot stove?” and Google will instantly direct you to a site that tells you not to touch a hot stove, but what Google does not provide is the tactile lesson one gets when the hot-stove hand-touching theory is put to the test.


   The internet is a tool and needs to be respected as such. While it can give its user insightful information about some far off land, it will never replace the experiences one absorbs when traveling there in person. The key to proper internet use is all in following the direction manual and using a bit of self-control. The only problem is, there is no user manual and humans have been losing the self-control war ever since Eve friended the snake.

It don't fret about it. Its just more change that I cant control, so why worry? Unfortunately lots of stuff that is happening gets me down. Maybe the difference is subtle but to me its a big difference.

When I go to sleep at night I usually sleep like a baby. Its a different world in sleep land... The rest of this should go in the other thread.....

WOW bp....great read...I take it you got an A+ on that, or so I hope!

just a plain old A....and i only got that cuz i payed the prof  off with a bottle of Bowens.