Expert answer:Journal #4

Expert answer:Jurnals for these three topics. 500 word for EACH topic.Journal Requirements:Journals must be a minimum of 500 words minimum, and you must reply to at least 2 peers. There is no word limit on peer replies, but you must show that you have engaged with your peers’ responses and not simply said “I agree” or “Great post!” A substantial reply could be anywhere between 50 and 150 words. You are not required, but you are encouraged to continue replying to one another throughout the week. Let’s have some great conversations! Failure to meet the word limit will result in a reduced journal grade. Ad Hominem attacks will not be tolerated. If you disagree with someone, attack the argument, not the person.For every journal, include a summary and analysis of all the texts that you read for the week. Failure to summarize/analyze will result in half credit (or less) for the journal.The prompt (this is separate from the summary/analysis) is a guideline, and will usually be open-ended (i.e. not a question with a right or wrong answer. Additionally, I want you to explore your own thoughts and feelings and ideas along with the texts and the subject matter in order to improve your critical reading, writing, and thinking skills.
is_google_making_us_stupid____the_atlantic.pdf

smarter_than_you_think.pdf

why_jonathan_safran_foer_chose_to_give_up_meat___the_new_york_times_1.pdf

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Is Google Making Us Stupid? ­ The Atlantic
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
What the Internet is doing to our brains
NICHOLAS CARR
JULY/AUGUST 2008 ISSUE
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TEXT SIZE
TECHNOLOGY
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Illustration by Guy Billout
“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the
supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a
famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A
Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the
malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that
control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can
feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that
someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural
circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—
but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly
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when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.
My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d
spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case
anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get
fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m
always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to
come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a
lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great
databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research
that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be
done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve
got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as
likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails,
scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or
just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes
likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward
them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for
most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The
advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of
information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded.
“The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can
be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media
theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive
channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the
process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my
capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in
information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy
on a Jet Ski.
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I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and
acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar
experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay
focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun
mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media,
recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major
in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?”
He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much
because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because
the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also
has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost
totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he
wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the
University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a
telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato”
quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many
sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the
ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too
much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological
and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet
use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits ,
conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well
be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year
research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior
of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one
by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books,
and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites
exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and
rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more
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than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to
another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they
ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense;
indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users
“power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts
going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading
in the traditional sense.
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of textmessaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the
1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different
kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new
sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a
developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the
Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf
worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency”
and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of
deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made
long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we
tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to
make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without
distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched
into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the
symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or
other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an
important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments
demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental
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circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us
whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many
regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions
as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as
well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven
by our reading of books and other printed works.
Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen
Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a
page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches.
He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to
give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered
touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his
fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a
composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had
become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument
even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work,
his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and
paper.”
Also see:
Living With a Computer (July 1982)
“The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft
of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen…”
By James Fallows
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the
forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German
media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to
aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
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The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our
mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so
neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But
brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor
of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George
Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells
routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to
Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual
technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities
—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical
clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling
example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis
Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and
helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable
sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of
reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the
scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist
Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human
Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged
from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished
version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that
formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to
eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started
obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the
changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the
mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like
clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as
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operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much
deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also
at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a
paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a
digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be
programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device.
And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful
computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s
becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our
calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It
injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital
gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has
absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re
glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our
attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As
people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional
media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add
text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles,
introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse infosnippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the
second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom
Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste”
of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the
pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the newmedia rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted
such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all
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that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly,
it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young
man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel
plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving
the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he
recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking
machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations
of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete
steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set
of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker
should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming
that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity
soared.
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial
Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight
industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by
manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking
maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used
time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their
workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The
Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the
“one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of
science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was
applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring
about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect
efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the
system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial
manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers
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and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to
govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the
efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information,
and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the
perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to
describe as “knowledge work.”
Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the
Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism.
Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around
the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does.
Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine
and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the
Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that
increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it.
What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information
and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect
search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you
mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is
a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with
industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster
we can extract their gist, the more productive we becom …
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