Do you ever lose focus while reading? Do you constantly find yourself on your phone scrolling through emails, articles and social feeds? The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr takes an in-depth look at the impact humans miss when using the Internet. Many people now hardly engage in contemplative, reflective, and deep reading actions due to highly distracting and addictive Internet technologies. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The author establishes his argument using his personal life and how his brain has changed by using the internet, then continues in the second half of the book to explain how heavy internet use can have harmful effects. Nicholas Carr effectively portrays the effects of the Internet which leads to the question: are they cost effective? Nicholas Carr uses the Prologue: The Watchdog and The Thief to define a new medium and how it affects us. A 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan predicted that “whenever a new medium arrives, people naturally become involved in the information” (Carr 2). He believed that society will suffer from the inability to participate in “linear thinking” due to electric media. McLuhan made it clear when he said, “Our focus on the content of a medium can blind us to these profound effects. (Carr 3) and we end up thinking that “technology is just a tool, inert until we take it into our hands and inert again once we put it aside. ”Carr uses this book as a pretext to explain the trap in which the new Internet medium has trapped us. The first chapter goes into detail about Carr's personal introduction to technology and how he noticed it changed the way he thinks. Carr first makes a connection to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey in which a supercomputer HAL attempts to kill the human astronauts he worked with. The astronauts in response disconnect the HAL and the super computer begins to cry: "My mind goes, I feel it." It could be a similar feeling to the one we feel. We feel rewired using the Internet as some of our mental abilities fade away and without the Internet we feel like HAL, disconnected. An important discussion has been brought to light about the reduction of people's sustained concentration due to the way we use the Internet. The way we quickly scroll and gather information through the Internet has prevented people from reading longer, more linear texts like books and articles. They studied 6,000 children raised through the Internet and found that they ignored traditional reading methodology and instead tried to scan the page for the most important information. Comparing a short text online or reading a large book, skimming may work for the Internet, but for a larger text you need long-sustained linear left-to-right thinking. Life Paths is an important chapter because it delves into the discovery of neuroplasticity, which Carr begins by explaining a story about how minds can be shaped. A writer named Fredrick Nietzsche had some health problems. These complications caused him headaches and nausea when he wrote for long periods. To survive he replaced traditional pen and paper with a typewriter. The typewriter removed barriers when writing with pen and paper, but this change resulted in a change in his writing style. Carr states that Nietzsche's writing “had become moretight, more telegraphic. ”Michael Merzenich mapped brain function by interfacing electrodes with the monkeys' brains and then noting the electrodes activated when the monkey's various bodily nerves were stimulated. This then paved the way for demonstrating that the brain is malleable and can restructure itself for long-term cognitive changes. Neuroplasticity is a component of the body that allows it to heal but also leads to life-changing adaptation to the environment. The example of a monkey being given a simple pair of pliers or a rake shows the monkey's brain showing the expansion of the brain and defining the circuits for using tools. The monkey is discovering how to use the tool as an extension of the hand just comparable to how we use the Internet and use it as a tool. Entering the third chapter, Tools of the mind, we delve into the overview of the technologies that have reshaped the mind. All technologies fall into four categories: physical strength, sensitivity of the senses, adaptation to nature and cognitive support. There are pros and cons to everything, just like when clocks were invented and many people previously did not need a precise time of day to carry out daily activities or when Socrates thought that when the new writing technology emerged above of oral tradition would have ruined people's ability to memorize. they thought people would only be able to collect data instead of gaining knowledge. What writing has given us is certainly precious. But with new technologies comes consideration of what we have lost, and perhaps the latest technology, the Internet, deserves the same consideration. The Deeping Page focuses on the developments throughout the history of reading and writing that lead to a literate society and the inherent neurological changes that result from these advances. Reading has improved our social progress but, more importantly, it has rewired our brains on a massive scale. From the beginning, learning to read requires our brains to first process the visual shapes to translate into letters and then begin reading these letters with much less mental effort. Deep reading has led to three social impacts: The first is deep thinking, which is the systematic and linear type of thinking. Secondly is the written clarity, the ideas begin to have greater clarity, elegance and originality. The last is private learning where reading has become commonplace. Books have allowed knowledge and learning to become quiet and private. Furthermore, learning was based on people's interests. You may also be interested in Good Books to Read: Your Ultimate Summer Checklist Say No to Plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essays Books: Books Give You Everything… In the next version of the book, Carr dives into the effects with rigorous use of the Internet. Starting from chapter five: Medium of a more general nature, it is shown that the way in which computers and the Internet have developed has led to the displacement of new content by the medium. It begins with the introduction of a man named Alan Turning, the man who disrupted Nazi communications during World War II, who imagined a machine that could complete the functions. “Alan Turing is best remembered as the creator of an imaginary computing device that anticipated and served as the model for the modern computer. ”With time and progress the Internet has become that machine. With so many uses, people are forced to spend enormous amounts of time working on them. Carr hasused clear evidence to support this claim, for example: "A 2008 international survey of 27,500 adults between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five found that people spend thirty percent of their free time online" (Carr 86) and in 2009: “the average teenager sent or received a staggering 2,272 messages per month. (Carr 86) …Chapter six, The Very Image of a Book, explores the shift from physical books to the Internet from e- book. Also, how this transition is reshaping content and our minds. “As soon as you insert links into a book and connect it to the web – as soon as you 'extend' it, 'improve' it and make it 'dynamic' – you change that. that is and changes, as does the experience of reading it.” The Internet has made its way into books in what is called e-books. Fear has emerged because immersive, linear thinking is disappearing while the electronic version of a book is gaining popularity. “A printed matter is a finished object… The finality of the act of publishing has long instilled in the best and most conscientious writers and editors the desire, even the anxiety, to perfect the works they produce – to write with an eye and an ear turned to eternity. Electronic text is impermanent. ” (Carr 107) In these e-books come distracting links and less incentive for quality. Because of this move away from printed books, there has been a loss of importance of linear thinking following the new fast scanning methodology of the meaning. The Juggler's Brain delves into detail about the effects the Internet is having on the minds of users and the studies that have demonstrated these effects The Juggler's Brain is the perfect way to describe how, when all our attention is focused on the Internet, we're actually just jumping from one distraction to another. “When our brains are overloaded, we find 'distractions more distracting.'” (Carr 125) The Internet limits our working memory (the bridge between short-term and long-term memory term) which prevents us from storing the contents. A quote from Carr says, “Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence on how we think is this: The Net captures our attention only to scatter it. (Carr 118) During the reading a book, the brain allows a flow like a river and the working memory is able to function. In this way, it improves and allows a lot of important information to accumulate in long-term memory. The Internet brings a sudden wave of multiple rapids, we are so overwhelmed by it that it almost passes through us. The Church of Google, a detailed chapter on the origin of Google and the evolution that leads to the effects of the medium Google is a company that needs to make money, and to meet demand they place ads. The more times someone clicks on a link, the more money Google makes by incentivizing us to keep clicking rather than staying on a single page. This blocks deep learning and this quote proves it: “It is in Google's economic interest to make sure you click as often as possible. The last thing the company wants is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, focused thinking. Google is, quite literally, in the distraction business. ” (Carr 157) The Internet has led to a domino effect of elements that lead to skimming as the “correct” methodology for gathering information. Carr states, “Information overload has become a lifelong affliction…The only way to cope is to increase our scanning and skimming” (Carr 170). It is essential to build the system that Google has established itself on. Not to be 213)