Blog Post 11

As many others have said, I was not a big fan of The Shallows, in fact, I found it very difficult to concentrate while reading because I was so uninterested. I thought Carr’s arguments were constantly overdrawn and that overall his argument was weak. I didn’t think that it was necessary for him to go into such depth with many of the topics that he brought up. Instead he should have focused on making more valid points to support his argument that the internet is changing our brains for the worse. I agree that the internet has harmed our attention span, making it shorter and causing us to become distracted more easily because as he talked about, our brains have gotten use to the short snippets of information, making it harder for us to focus for a long period of time. However, I do not necessarily agree that the internet is all bad. We talked about in class a lot of the pros that the internet encompasses, such as being able to work faster and having the accessibility to become more knowledgeable, as well as being able to communicate with others through social media. I think Carr overlooked some of these aspects, or if he didn’t, then chose not to talk about them, which I think hindered his argument. I also don’t agree that books are becoming obsolete. Although they are being used less, I think that they are and will continue to be used, even though technology is advancing, making it easier not to need them. In my opinion books will always hold value and I don’t believe that they are going anywhere.