This English Honors Course for First Year Quinnipiac University Students explores Key Concepts of the World Wide Web, the experience of Cyberspace and arguments for and against a life increasingly spent "online" rather than with one's self. Topics include social networking, reading versus browsing, privacy and publicity, literacy and distraction, and a host of other technological quandries dealing with cell phones, texting, gaming, anonymity and identity, community and alienation.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
CybeRhetoric Post #2: Triangulating Community and Identity with Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
Here is where you post your second assignment. BTW: Here is the hypermedia version of Carr:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google You might wish to re-read with the hyberlinks in mind.
Over the last decade, the Internet has become a major player in the way that society works and develops. Although it provides a quick and easy means of accessing information and communicating, the Internet is arguably responsible for a change in the way that people think. However, the debate arises over the amount of control that individual people have while on the Internet. In his article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr discusses the effect of the internet on the human brain. Carr acknowledges the widespread impact of the Internet, stating, “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” (57). The influence of the Internet is undeniable, yet Carr focuses on the impact that the availability of information has on the way that people work and function. He admits, “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” (57). By having information so readily accessible, there seems to be little need for deep analytical thinking and reading. Just as the Internet provides a quick way for people to access information, it also presents an easy way for people to connect to other people, as Jodi Dean discusses in her essay, “Community”. Dean emphasizes how simple it is to meet others and interact via the Internet. However, although she recognizes that the Internet can play a major role in building community, she admits that there is some risk to connecting to other online: “the idea that everybody might know your name can be more frightening than reassuring for it suggests the increased surveillance power that the Web provides, enabling someone to find you and uncover your secrets” (4). Dean views the computer as a tool, which can be used as a way to connect to people in a virtual realm. This virtual realm, although lacking in face-to-face interaction, is complex in its own right. Dean goes as far as to say that “Web-based community is infused with feeling, emotion, and affect” (5). Just as Carr discusses the effect of the Internet on the human mind, so does Dean in relation to building a sense of community. She emphasizes that the Internet can become a world of its own, stating, “On-line, one didn’t know another’s race, ethnicity, or ability. One didn’t respond to another on the basis of appearance, but on the basis of ideas; the virtual community was a community of mind” (9). Rather than connecting to people based on physical attributes, people online can find others who share similar values, ideas, and beliefs. However, this does raise several questions (which Dean acknowledges in her essay) relating to trust issues on the Internet. For example, “How could we be sure who we were talking to? If we couldn’t see who we were talking to, how could we trust them?” (10) Online deception still remains an issue in society today, and threatens the credibility of many social networking sites which were originally created to promote community. Essentially, Dean’s essay supports the ideas presented in Carr’s article. The way in which people connect on the Internet does affect the way they think. Because of the risk of online deception, people have become more protective of their own personal information, and more wary of people that they meet on the Internet. Yet another author who discusses the influence of the Internet is Jay David Bolter, although he focuses on the impact of the Web on creating and developing a sense of identity. Bolter begins by addressing the relationship between the impact of the media and the formation of identity, stating, “we employ media in defining both our personal and cultural identities…we become simultaneously both the subject and object of our contemporary media” (17). Due to the fact that much of our contemporary media is dependent on the Internet, it only makes sense that the Web would play a key role in defining the identities of those living and interacting with society today. In fact, Bolter states, “we understand our mediated selves as reformed versions of earlier mediated selves” (18). Bolter conveys the idea that as the Internet begins to influence individual lives more and more, people are more likely to find their identities constantly changing. However, although Bolter’s view of identity seems to coincide with Carr’s idea that people have lost the ability to think for themselves on the internet, Bolter goes a step further to indicate that people still have full control of the way that they express themselves on the Internet. In discussing the concept of the homepage, Bolter claims, “the Web is a media form in which the individual can take on the role of producer as well as consumer” (20). When creating a homepage, people have the ability to put forth whatever identity they wish others to see; they can control the way that others view them on the Internet, and, in essence, create an online identity which they might not pursue in the real world. This argument is strengthened by the recent development of webcams, which allow people to self-project their image onto the web, making themselves even more available to others on the Internet. Bolter even states, “The new genre of Webcams allows individuals to bypass that selection process and designate themselves as celebrities” (22). This can be seen throughout society today, and many household names come from people who promote themselves on popular websites, such as YouTube and MySpace. In fact, many Internet stars now find themselves hosting their own reality television shows on networks like MTV, famous for both their Internet status and television reputation. In cases like these, people have used the Internet as a means of taking control over their own lives, using it to their advantage in order to achieve the identity that they want others to perceive. In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr makes a good argument that people are surrendering to the fast and easy world of the Internet. He states that if we lose the power to control the way that we think and analyze material, “we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture” (63). This is reflected in Dean’s analysis of online communities, in which she relays the idea that people must change the way that they think to adapt to the culture of the Internet. However, Bolter challenges these ideas when he discusses how people can take control of their own lives via the Internet. He argues that while we must adapt to think appropriately online, it is fundamentally just another way to define ourselves and connect with other people. Rather than losing control of the way that we think, we can define and manipulate the way in which we are seen. Although both sides disagree about the extent of control that we have over the Internet, they agree on the idea that the Internet is an influential resource—something that affects the way we live our daily lives, how we think, and how we define ourselves.
The Impact of the Internet on Aspects of Human Life Writers Jodi Dean, Jay David Bolter, and Nicholas Carr comment on the rapidity of the internet’s progress as it revolutionizes today’s society. In their respective texts, Dean discusses identity, Bolter discusses community, and Carr discusses the constant availability of information that comes through the internet. Though seemingly unrelated, similarities could be drawn among the works of the three writers. Therefore, Dean and Bolter’s writings could either be used to support or refute the message that Carr portrays through his piece: that the internet is changing the way humans think and is detracting from their ability to contemplate texts and matters in everyday life. In Jodi Dean’s chapter of Unspun, she focuses on what users consider to be the community aspect of the web. In her text, Dean quotes Howard Rheingold to explain an internet community: “Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (5). Though Dean brings up examples of successful communities like The Well, she also notes examples of internet misconduct. She says that, “many who ventured onto the electronic frontier discovered not the friendly and engaging free-for-all of The Well but a whole new field of dangers and uncertainties. Instead of fascinating debates on politics and the economy, they found teenagers exchanging banalities and expletives; instead of information, they found drivel” like pornography (10). This statement is similar to one of Carr’s when he says, “I’m not thinking the way I used to think” (Is Google Making us Stupid?). Though Carr is not suggesting that the internet is forcing foolishness upon him, the two statements support one another. Dean’s statement suggests to readers that, as people become accustomed to using the web, they explore more and more sites and eventually find satisfaction in the less respectable ones. The reasons that people use the internet begin innocently enough with humans socializing online, but change negatively as time goes on and humans realize what else is available on the web. Carr is also suggesting that the internet is bringing about a change in people. Though the change that Carr notes is not as disreputable as the change that Dean notes, he is still experiencing a change. As Carr continues to use the internet, he finds it difficult to immerse himself “in a book or lengthy article” which, he says, “used to be easy” (Is Google Making us Stupid?). This similarity draws attention to the fact that, in many ways, the internet is changing humans. Though Dean’s first similarity supports Carr’s claim, there is a second similarity that somewhat discredits his ideas. When Dean contributed her chapter on Community to Unspun, the internet was still in developmental stages. Dean recounts an incident that occurred on a site called LimbdaMOO. On this site, humans are able to create virtual people living in an online community. Apparently, years ago, a member of LimbdaMOO violated other members online, committing such inappropriate acts as rape. As a result of this behavior, security was reinforced on the web, preventing further injustices. Similarly, Carr expresses doubts about his own worries. He notes that, years ago, people feared the development of writing and then the printing press. The relevance of Dean’s LimbdaMOO story in comparison to Carr’s doubts is that there are flaws and reservations about all new ideas when they are first developed. Though LimbdaMOO underwent difficulties in the beginning, the problems were resolved. It is possible that, in time, the advantages to the internet will overshadow the drawbacks, and Carr will have worried needlessly. Jay David Bolter follows Jodi Dean’s commentary with his own beliefs about cyber identity. In Bolter’s chapter, he explains how a human can go onto the internet and create a new identity for himself. “At any given moment,” he says, “an individual is defined by the connections that she chooses to establish with other individuals, activity groups, and religious and secular organizations. She is, in principle, always free to break these connections and establish new ones…” (26). This idea suggests that, in cyberspace, humans can easily align themselves with one group and can just as easily leave. Humans are able to create and sever ties in no time at all. Carr finds that the internet is causing a similar phenomenon of rapid online searching when he talks about how the internet is “chipping away” one’s “capacity for concentration and contemplation” and also when he talks about how rapidly people view websites when searching for information that pertains to the topic they are studying (Is Google Making us Stupid?). He says, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (Is Google Making us Stupid?). Here, Carr is professing his belief that the web is causing people to explore less. They are no longer becoming interested in everything they come across but are quickly dismissing whatever does not reap immediate benefits. This similarity between Bolter and Carr’s texts supports the idea that the internet is decreasing the amount of time, attention, and depth that humans give. The simplicity of both severing ties within a group and of clicking out of an unhelpful article are direct results of the speed and ease that come with the internet. People expect swiftness in their lives and have learned to embrace it. Though proven to be similar in the preceding paragraph, Bolter and Carr’s ideas eventually diverge. Despite Carr’s hesitation toward the internet, he does believe that the copious amounts of information are making humans smarter. He says, “The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers” (Is Google Making us Stupid?). Bolter disagrees with this belief. He feels that such easy access to information is causing humans to lose their own beliefs due to the tidal wave of new beliefs that are constantly present on the web. He quotes Kenneth Gergen, who says, “For everything we “know to be true” about ourselves, other voices within respond with doubt and even derision” (23). This concern suggests that the internet is providing so many opinions and views that people are forgetting the beliefs that they held before becoming users. Despite Carr and Bolter’s similar beliefs, they fail to reach a consensus due to this argument. The final authors to compare are Jodi Dean and Jay David Bolter. There is one clear similarity that can be seen in their texts. They both believe that the internet offers freedom to humans. Dean finds no prejudices in online communities because online, one doesn’t know another’s “sex, race, ethnicity, or ability” (9). She says that one doesn’t “respond to another on the basis of appearance, but on the basis of ideas” (9). Bolter agrees with Dean in very similar terms when he says, online, “race, gender, and even many physical disabilities do not matter: in cyberspace women and minorities can communicate without experiencing the prejudices that they confront in the physical world” (27). However, they, too, depart in their similar beliefs because, while Bolter finds the internet to be a place of much needed freedom with a plethora of possibilities (much due to the invention of web cams), Dean looks at the internet as a money making business with some benefits, but that is by no means flawless. Overall, Dean and Bolter argue both for and against Carr’s argument. It seems that a consensus cannot be reached based purely upon the ideas of these three writers. Though the web is changing humans, there is no clear cut indication as to whether the changes are for the better or the worse. However, it can certainly be concluded that the internet defines today’s society and is here to stay.
The Influence of the Internet on the Way Its Users Think There is no doubt that the Internet has shaped the lives of people living in the twenty-first century. It is a resource for needs big and small and is used by people of all different ages and backgrounds. Writers Nicholas Carr, Jodi Dean, and Jay David Bolter have all addressed the Internet and its role in the general public’s lives in their own articles about Google, Internet communities, and the identities of Internet users. While each address different issues, all three writers support the idea that the Internet has changed the lives of its users and the way in which the users think. In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr makes the point that the Internet provides numerous advantages for its users, like “having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information” (57). As a writer, he says that research that would have taken him days can now be completed in just a few minutes with a few clicks of the mouse. Carr makes sure to point out the benefits of the Internet but he also points out its drawbacks, like that he feels the Internet is “chipping away” his “capacity for concentration and contemplation” (57). Carr refers to Scott Karp, an online blogger, who believes the web has not only changed the way he reads, but, more profoundly, it has also changed the way he thinks. Carr also refers to a developmental psychologist, Maryanne Wolf, who similarly believes the Internet is weakening our capacity for deep reading, as readers now just browse and skim. Readers value efficiency and immediacy in the information they acquire and read, so their ability to interpret text is left unused. Google, a fast-growing company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, is one of the most widely used sources for internet users to acquire such information. “The company has declared that its mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’” (62). Google wants to turn the search engine into a kind of artificial intelligence so that the site knows what users want from their searches and is able to give them just that. The site wants to “solve problems that have never been solved before” (62), and to use technology in new ways. Google even utilizes its users’ searches and the pages they view to gain information about the users themselves and to show them advertisements personalized to their interests. Not only are people making the Internet a large part of their lives, but the Internet is also tuning into the lives and needs of its users. Carr questions whether humans’ intelligence is worsening as computers’ and the Internet’s artificial intelligence is improving. It may seem like a safe assumption to say that people are not reading as many books as they used to and that they have gotten lazier when it comes to reading, but there are still people who enjoy sitting down with a good book or finding and researching their own information in libraries. Carr seems to speak for society as a whole when he claims that his ability to concentrate and contemplate text has changed, which may not be the case for everybody. Carr may seem accurate in his arguments, but until studies and research are done to prove his points, the true effects of this Internet age are not known. Jodi Dean expresses her view of artificial intelligence in the chapter of Unspun entitled, “Community”. While Carr noted that the Internet is able to pick up on users’ interests, Dean noted that the Internet is also able to link people with similar interests together. People are able to communicate and bond although they are not physically close or similar in other ways simply because they share some interest. Dean mentions chatrooms like Community Memory and The Well that allow strangers to freely circulate information and affiliate on the basis of common interests. Communities like these create connections without judgment because of the animosity of the users behind their computer screens. While all of this interconnection may be beneficial to some people, other people take advantage of the openness and accessibility of the web to deceive, violate, and threaten complete strangers. Chatrooms and other online communities are often disrupted by people with bad intentions, just like the Internet and its convenience are disrupted by the overwhelming number of pornographic sites and images. In the chapter, Dean makes the point that the Internet is great for its ability to bring people together, but is also flawed in the way it allows for deception and the display of inappropriate material. In this way, Dean’s arguments support Carr’s argument that the Internet, although seemingly entirely useful, is sometimes faulty. In his chapter of Unspun entitled, “Identity”, Jay David Bolter focuses on the Internet’s many uses and its ability to help users develop their own identity. He states, “The World Wide Web…permits us to construct our identities in and through the sites that we create and as well as those that we visit” (17). Bolter notes the Internet’s many uses, like for doing business, viewing television programs, and downloading and listening to music. With the use of homepages and webcams, individuals put their lives on the web as if they were performance artists. Like Dean mentioned, people use chatrooms, or virtual environments, like MUD and MOO to connect. With resources like these, the web allows users to assume multiple voices, like for business, personal use, or scholarly communication. In this respect, people are able to assume voices other than their everyday personas, so that women often assume male identities and men assume female identities. This occurs even though “in these new communications technologies race, gender and even many physical disabilities do not matter: in cyberspace women and minorities can communicate without experiencing the prejudices that they confront in the physical world” (27). People enjoy this freedom from judgment and the ability they have to create an identity on the web different from the identity that exists on the other side of the computer screen. This ties into Dean’s reference to deception on the Internet, but Bolter seems to mention this creation of identity in a more positive light. All three authors, Carr, Dean and Bolter, note in their writings the many uses and benefits of the Internet. Carr makes the point, that is then supported by Dean and Bolter, that the Internet has changed the lives of all its users and affected the way they think and interact. Whether these users use the search engine, Google, use chatrooms like The Well, or create an identity for themselves using their webcams, the Internet has proven beneficial in most situations. Carr’s article challenges the way Internet users think, while Dean and Bolter’s chapters challenge the way Internet users interconnect and define themselves. Regardless of its use, it is easy to say “never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives-or exerted such a broad influence over our thoughts-as the Internet does today” (Carr 60).
Over the past few decades, the world has undergone a revolution that has transformed both the thoughts and underlying intelligence of the human mind; this revolution is the Internet. The World Wide Web has become an obsession for many people, where the need for this accessible technology overpowers their primitive inclinations towards literature, art, and critical thinking as a whole. The Net offers the potential for social unity, economic success, fulfillment of identity, and free thought. However, despite the positive appeal of this popular utility, the Internet is also a place of individualistic self-servitude and the center of a power struggle between the creator and the reader. Today, the Web has become mobile and handheld, linking individuals to the greatest present database of knowledge. With all of this information at the fingertips of society, the current generation follows a post-modern cyber lifestyle, allowing the Web to link them to civilization when their own minds become incapable of establishing this connection. Within this virtual space of free speech and unknown persons, a myriad of possibilities awaits all those who dare to venture down the “highway” of the World Wide Web. One of the most appealing attributes of the World Wide Web is the presence of a community. This community exists as an entity void of discrimination based on social class or physical appearance; the Net lets individuals establish their own identity online. As Jodi Dean comments, “Community may well be the most powerful of the aspirations linked to the World Wide Web” (Dean 4). As the name ‘World Wide’ suggests, the Web allows people from all corners of the world within their individual neighborhoods to achieve a higher level of cultural depth. The diversity of the collective online population presents “opportunity to build connections beyond [an individual’s] particular interests” (Dean 8). Likewise, the survival of this interconnected society relies upon the economic and social interests of the whole; they act as a single “community of mind” (Dean 9). The group is considered as one single unit, disregarding the influence that an individual may have in the grand spectrum of the Web’s existence and altering identity. In Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he emphasizes the dependency upon the Web, which inevitably leads to this uselessness of individual characters. Despite the allure of this technological nation, the community presented is falsely ideal through its ultimate isolation of the individual. To many people, the Web presents itself as a social utility that reveals a utopia of connectivity and legitimate regard for other members within the cyber body. At the emergence of the Web, people sought some sense of this utopia and “Community was thus the promise of meaningful, personal, self-organized interconnection” (Dean 10). The supposedly sentimental feelings create whims of connectivity and assurance. However, despite the aspirations for harmony that this virtual world creates, it presents individuals with a false sense of security. Society as a whole has become fearful of leaving their homes, filled with anxieties about mass murderers. Despite this fear, they disregard the danger of disclosing personal information to other members of this universal online community because of an assumed trust. However, these ideals were quickly shattered by the recognition of deception, and the imperfections of this new Net were revealed (Dean 11). Once this awareness occurred, all hope for an interconnected utopia was disregarded and “participants in computer-mediated communications could only simulate community” (Dean 12). At this point, the Net transformed to a self-fulfilling convenience where individuals focused on themselves and their place in the World Wide Web. As the Net continued to grow in popularity over the decades, people began to realize its capacity to provide independence and the formation of identity. The Web allows people to exhibit their personality in whatever form they desire, creating any character regardless of their actual gender, race, or social status. Likewise, this technology gave people the opportunity to “become simultaneously both the subject and object of [their] contemporary media” (Bolter 17). Essentially, individuals could create themselves to be authors of a blog page, masterminds or a webpage or online business, or even stars in their own movies or webcam videos. People would search the web for new perspectives and ideas, utilizing Google and other connective sites to create an individual identity through consumerism or social connections. However, despite the artistic outlets available through the Web’s technology and the linking of an identity to a community, this power also results in a confusion of members as they grow tired of one identity and so create another. “The networked self…seems to correspond to a fluctuating and relatively weak notion of community, because in cyberspace identity and community are defined reciprocally” (Bolter 26). In this manner, the Internet becomes detrimental to identity, creating profit for companies but leaving the individual paranoid, confused, and searching for reality in a virtual world. Despite the negative effects that were becoming frighteningly realistic, society as a whole ignored the strife of identity and mistrust to reap the benefits of financial gain. For the economic marketers targeting this new plethora of consumers, the Web could “gather information about the individual user and therefore tailor its commercial messages much more specifically” (Bolter 19). Carr discusses how Google targets the individual desires of every member surfing the Net to bring them the greatest resources, in turn influencing what they will continue to view and observe online. Jay David Bolter recognized this merging of the economic and private spheres, realizing the effects of the various mediums of expression available to individuals surfing the Web, allowing them to manifest their identities in “an intimate portrait of the author and yet published that portrait to thousands of anonymous readers” (Bolter 21). This manifestation applies to both the financial and the expressive attributes of the Internet; the instinct for creativity of identity becomes more desirable then the probable confusion. This confusion of identity and false sense of community drives the success of the Internet. For the technology to prevail efficiently, the principles of individuals must remain self-centered and naïve. Google, in its attempts to enhance the mind, seeks to understand the individual reader and make all information accessible to them. However, in their attempts to overshadow critical understanding with ease, they create “a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of self” (Carr 58). Through this new thought process, the creators of web pages help to form the already delicate identities that people are so eager to alter on the Web. Danger occurs when people “come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world,” but in all actuality it is the individual’s “own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence” (Carr 63). At this rate of reliance, it is only inevitable that people will begin to fully depend on the technology. In this virtually-dependent world of cyber space, all critical thought will ultimately be lost to this YouTube generation.
The Internet has been shaping my generation for almost a decade. The ways of communication such as simple telephone calls and letters have turned to text messaging and Facebook wall posts. There is no dispute that the World Wide Web has altered the methods of reading, writing, and even thinking. The question is: could this change be for the worst? The arguments posed by Nicholas Carr, Jodi Dean, and Jay David Bolter discuss the benefits and failures of the Internet. The extensive look that each author provides into the topics of community, identity, and our ability to learn and read cover many points that have a direct impact on our generation. The most common themes addressed by the authors include the changes in thought processes and the need for community and personal acceptance by Internet users. Each argument covers unique and over-lapping aspects of computer use that deserve to be understood. The readings in Unspun dealt primarily with the problems created by the Internet concerning virtual communities and privacy. Dean argued that many of the earliest forms of cyber communities reduced prejudices among people of different races, sex, or socio-economic status. Through websites such as “The Well”, users could be anyone they wanted. This caused many unexpected problems of perversion and a lack of rules for this completely new medium of interaction. Dean argues, “If we couldn’t see who we were talking to, how could we trust them? How could we be sure who we were talking to? The instability of networked identities and relations was starting to look less like the fulfillment of community than its corruption” (10). Bolter raises similar questions of anonymity in the chapter about identity development. Both arguments stressed the importance of shaping an identity before a user can belong to a community on the web. The prejudices could potentially resurface if the user over- developed their cyber identity. Bolter describes the phenomena of cyber identity and actual identity becoming synonymous. In accordance with Dean’s observations, the media shapes our growth in every way and it becomes impossible to distinguish reality from the cyber world (Bolter 20). Each argument outlines problems that did not exist before the Internet and create a web of further complications. Both authors also discussed the financial motivation behind many of the websites available and the effect that has had on Internet users. The desire to make money off of the Internet has driven many of the online communities and personal web pages accessible today. Dean discusses the idea that this desire for wealth has created a false community with skewed priorities. With the development of online regulations, advertisements began to play an important role in the sites most commonly visited. Dean explores the restrictions of commercials on the internet, “With its decision that the CDA was too commercially restrictive for the fast lane of the information super-highway, the Court established a space for e-commerce and business use of the Web” (14). This altered the original views of online community, making the Internet a more professional, if not more difficult, place to navigate. Bolter shares Dean’s opinion of online advertising being used to shape the identities of users. Being perhaps the most influential form of media being used in our society, these advertisements affect everyone and form their economic and social aspects of identity. Bolter stressed the fact that the Internet has drastically changed Americans as consumers. The complexities of the World Wide Web aided this change, because website managers could target consumers better, having a more specific idea of their demographic (Bolter 18). The community and identity of consumers is arguably the most influential use of the Internet today, fueling businesses and economies all over the world, in both negative and positive ways. Carr and Bolter discuss the adaptation that must take place in order to successfully use the Internet. The issues of public versus private identity call for a considerable adjustment. Reminiscent of Samuel Pepys’ journals of the 17th century, the personal homepage or blog makes any private thoughts open to the entire world. Bolter comments, “The personal homepage, whose purpose is nothing other than identity construction, has already emerged as one of the most interesting Web genres” (20). Blogging supplies the open communication between users that many online communities do not provide. The issue still exists, however, that no one user can completely determine the validity of a personal blog entry. Carr and Bolter address the adjustment that must be made to accommodate new media. “The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions,” explains Carr. The human brain will continue to adapt and absorb the current technology that is now available through the internet. Bolter and Carr argue that these adjustments are having a negative effect on the interactions we have with the people around us, in real life and online. One topic that Carr, Dean, and Bolter agree on is the slow, but definite change in the minds of Internet users. It is inevitable that each new form of media shapes a generation, but the World Wide Web is unique in that it is completely dependent on the people who become addicted to social networking and communication. Learning styles have been forced to adapt to these people, giving new meaning to the standard ways of text book learning. Carr argues that instead of reading books, internet users have become experts at “power browsing” and have lost the major ability to concentrate. In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr quotes Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist. In reference to the media, McLuhan explains that “they supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought” (The Atlantic 57). An important aspect of Carr’s argument that can be easily refuted is the opinion that this change in the thought process is a bad one. The Internet may be distracting users from reading long books or articles, but it has also made millions of news stories, scientific journals, and encyclopedias readily available to the average person. Before the World Wide Web, many Americans did not have access to those types of documents and typically did not put in the effort to find them. Dean and Bolter acknowledge these changes, yet also lean towards the negative impact of the Internet on our ways of thinking and learning. The arguments discussed by each author highlighted the current issues with Internet use. The way we communicate has been drastically altered as well as the identity formation each user experiences within their online community. In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr explains the toll computers have taken on learning styles and reading comprehension. He sums up the phenomena of the Internet quite well when he states, “Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives- or exerted such a broad influence over our thoughts- as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us” ( The Atlantic 60). With each new addition to the world of cyberspace, a new argument will arise about the positive or negative affects it is having on community, identity, and learning.
In every generation it seems, there is always one invention that has very permanent and lasting change on society, and equally, that invention revolutionizes the way people behave. In this particular case, the way that knowledge is gathered and accrued has been drastically improved as Nicholas Carr noted when he reported that it takes him minutes to find information that used to take him days at the library to find. Yet the development of the world-wide web has also created a new technological culture which has impacted and morphed both the traditional sense of community and identity. The cyber world has produced these changes, and has simultaneously brought up one particularly alarming question phrased by Mr. Carr. As he put it, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Now, at first glance, one might airily respond that the internet has made us all more educated because there is so much more knowledge that can be conjured in mere seconds. However, after inspecting such a question more thoroughly, the evidence supporting the claim that people have lost certain mental skills by way of using the internet is rather astonishingly not only evident, but nearly overwhelming. While this phenomenon is painfully clear, the question now becomes whether people are actually mentally stupider, or if people have just changed the way in which they learn. First, in accordance with Carr’s argument, it must be stated that there is an extreme amount of truth in his statement that e-browsing has trained the minds of people today who indulge in using the internet to read things less deeply. The example that he provides proving this point is the eye-witness testimony of a blogger named Bruce Friedman who has noticed that he had in his own words, “totally lost the ability to read or absorb a longish article on the web or in print.(Carr, 58)” He however is not alone in discovering this ailment. Additionally, many of Carr’s friends also described the same occurrences happening to themselves after Carr had come to them with his own admission (Carr, 58). What this proves is that for one thing, people are not thinking as deeply as in the past, and consequently, perhaps it can be surmised that very deep and critical thinkers are no longer as abundant as they once were. In that sense, we have become less intelligent due to the fact that many people are not able to think in the manner in which they once did. Furthermore, in this new age of cyber technology, as is the case with the breakdown of deep thinking and the demise of gaining significant knowledge through long correlated readings, there so too has been a breakdown in the sense of community. In particular, as referenced by Jodi Dean, the e-community has given credence to incredible amounts of deception resulting in a fervent lack of trust and the distortion of community (Dean, 5). This phenomenon is just another way that Google is making us stupid because just as the internet has sapped our ability to synthesize major academic works, so too has the internet ruined the fabric of community which is trust in the people around you. In a very abstract sense, it has made the community as weak as our minds because we are no longer able to readily accept and be faithful enough in people to blindly accept what they say because there have been too many examples of heinous activities such as avatars committing sexual cyberspace crimes just as LambdaMOO did one another, which has led to the mistrust and subsequent breakdown of community (Dean, 11). Nevertheless, although it may seem that society has been “dumbed down”, and analytically it has been proven so, the truth of the matter is that people today aren’t mentally stupider, they are just a different kind of learner and thinker. People have become much more adept at getting to the root of knowledge more quickly and efficiently (Carr, 62). The onus on literature has been placed on writing brief and to the point material, which people can then decode and use in whatever menial task which they need it for. Therefore, in that respect, communities have become increasingly more efficient and to the point, thereby making us more precise thinkers. In that regard, Google is not making us stupid, instead it is just making us more evolved thinkers with skills that fit the times and the latest demands placed on us. To further that point, Carr mentions the fact that unlike the people of the seventies and eighties, this generation’s tool for entertainment is not the television, but rather the internet (Carr, 60). Meaning that instead of sitting in front of the television for extended periods of time, people are instead sitting in front of computers, and more often than not, they are doing a fair amount of reading. Even if someone is blogging, they are both reading and writing which indicates that people are not necessarily reading less, they are just reading different. Likewise, in the book Unspun, Jay David Bolter makes note of the reality that identity as a characteristic is beginning to evolve (Bolter, 19). He points out that there is a shifting paradigm of how one’s identity is created. For a long time, people were defined or chose to be defined by their vertical heritage, yet Bolter insinuates that in the internet age, the way that an identity is manufactured is different (Bolter, 22). Today, identity is based on horizontal heritage, as in how we associate with characteristics that are popular today. Associations to political parties are derived not as much from how the past generations from your genealogy voted, but how we as current citizen’s view who has the necessary policies to better govern the world today. One example of this is the extreme shift from left-wing conservatism to a right wing platform buoyed by the policies that point toward drastic change. This example is relevant because it is very similar to the issue of whether people are stupider or just different. In the same way that political thinking has evolved, so too has the way that people acquire knowledge, and how according to Bolter, people have changed the way that they identify themselves. Henceforth, after examining the ways in which the internet has affected the phonically inclined people of today, I believe that the answer to the question posed by Nicholas Carr in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” cannot be affirmed in either extreme. On one hand, people have admitted that they are no longer able to read in the great lengths and with the understanding that they once did, thereby illustrating the fact that Socrates pointed out when writing was introduced by saying that in effect, the increase in technology dulls the mind (Carr, 63). Yet, on the other hand, this article points out that writing has become much more to the point and summarized, allowing for greater efficiency (Carr, 58). The contrast therefore between zipping along the sea of words on a jet-ski and submerging oneself in the very same sea, as the author put it, is great (Carr, 57). Nonetheless, in today’s world, people are called to mount the jet-ski and glide over the surface instead of mounting scuba gear and flipping overboard. Due to that discrepancy, I feel that Google, and internet readings aren’t making us less intelligent. By the same token, we are a different breed of thinker, and sadly, one that is no longer able to as Bruce Friedman; a professor from Michigan put it, “read War and Peace anymore. (Carr, 58)” While I am not privy to some particular information, it would be interesting to compare the verbal SAT scores from different generations to see if there has truly been a regression in such skills, but at this particular time, I think people have for better or worse, evolved as readers and as thinkers. Nothing more, nothing less.
Change can be quite a scary experience at times. Change can also be beautiful and fulfilling. However, one thing that change is definitely is a staple of the unknown and the particularly unfamiliar. Change is the common thread found throughout three different writings on the worldwide web: Community by Jodi Dean, Identity by Jay David Bolter, and Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr. If all of these writers sat down together to discuss their compositions, it is highly probable that they would have a few things to say to each other. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (Carr). In his article, Carr argues that it is very possible that the spread of internet use is slowly decreasing our ability to truly delve into a literary work and digest it fully. The human brain, as Carr reasons along with other sources of insightful opinion such as Friedrich Nietzsche and neuroscience professor James Olds, is extremely ductile throughout the stages of life. Evidence for this can be seen with the idea of drug addiction therapy. Although the patient is somewhat always inflicted with this addiction, the brain now free of drug stimuli or depression has the ability to mold itself to its new drugless functionality. The same effect is that of the human mind forming to a new way of reading, or “cyber reading”, in which information is processed faster and with, most likely, less comprehension. So after all of this, where does Google come into the picture? Basically, Google’s founders’ ultimate goal for the search engine is to find a way to make it work as artificial intelligence, in which to provide specific desired information at the drop of a hat (Carr). So what does that mean for actual human minds? One could only really guess at this point, but an adequate assumption would be that reading would probably not be much of an issue, even going as far to say that it could become extinct. In Community and Identity, there is a clear argument for the internet as a source of community building potential and identity affirming experiences as opposed to Carr’s argument that the web is facilitating a more shallow existence for its participants. In a way, these articles don’t view the internet as necessarily diminishing learning potential but perhaps enhancing it, if handled properly. In Community, Dean writes, “It enabled connections that transcended the very limits of the body: on-line, one didn’t know another’s sex, race, ethnicity, or ability. One didn’t respond to another on the basis of appearance, but on the basis of ideas; the virtual community was a community of mind.” Perhaps newly established internet communities can function as a truly enriching fellowship where active parties can explore their own personal identities and relate them to others. Bolter in Identity takes things a step further and suggests that how people represent themselves on-line (usually through homepages and/or webcams) can be used as a clue to study their own identities and the subsequent identities they “create” for themselves in cyber-reality. Mirroring Dean, Bolter also comments that, “in these new communications technologies race, gender, and even many physical disabilities do not matter: in cyberspace women and minorities can communicate without experiencing the prejudices that they confront in the physical world.” In this way, the internet gives people whose identities in the actual world of reality would be those that are not taken completely seriously a chance to develop the ideas and opinions of those identities more fully and empower them to grow and flourish. In general, both Community and Identity suggest an avenue by which people can develop strong and sometimes even intellectual communities and nurture their own perception of their identities. This is a different idea than is described in Carr’s article. Of course, there is a line to be crossed, a boundary between decent and indecent, between using the internet as a tool and surrendering our lives to it. However, do we ever truly know where that line is? Is the point of no return when we all so become cyborg versions of our previous selves as Google’s artificial intelligence takes over? Even though becoming robots is an obviously huge issue, the line of human decency is also being crossed not only in real, physical life but also in virtual reality. Dean describes a disturbing occurrence in an online “house” where users interact called LambdaMOO. In the living room of this virtual house, a clown-like character by the name of Mr. Bungle used a voodoo doll to force sexual activity and violation on others. This incident dented the sense of community once felt by that online server. Mr. Bungles was virtual killed off the online server as punishment, but this occurrence demonstrated the often shallow and dangerous internet that Carr describes. In his article Carr writes, “It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized…The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.” The farther and farther technological advances take us, the more and more it appears that the human brain is seen as something inferior, something that can be improved upon, just like a piece of machinery. As the perceived value of human decency and also of human intelligence wanes in the eyes of the public, the greater the influence of superficial learning, investigation, and basic human respect. When does the line between reality and pretend become fuzzy? Do we really know the person on the other end of the computer? Dean explains another chilling incident that occurred on the internet site CompuServe in Community. CompuServe was an email and conferencing provider (Dean). On this site, a completely healthy man in New York by the name of Alex posed as a woman named Joan who had been in a car accident which caused her to become disabled and deformed. Acting as “Joan”, Alex manipulated the women on the site by having deep conversations with them and even advocating them to engage in sexual relations with “her”. Once the scheme was uncovered, many of the manipulated women as well as others were extremely offended and felt a sense of betrayal (Dean). Dean writes, “Many of us online believe that we’re a utopian community of the future, and Alex’s experiment proved to us all that technology is no shield against deceit.” Besides just the deception that others inflict on the web, individuals can also damage their own sense of self. In Identity Bolter describes online “novels” or sites where many different participants embody a character and help to develop their story. This seems like a great tool by which to lose one’s own identity and cross the thin line between their true physical realities and the characters they form for themselves. Reading, as stated by Carr, is also taking on a different meaning through the worldwide web. It too, is becoming blurred. Human decency and surmised intellectual power is diminishing, as is people’s ability to distinguish between the real and make-believe. Although some aspects of the internet continue to be productive and safe avenues of exploration, other forces are also at work to turn the human into the subhuman; from deeply thinking individuals to shallow robots. In response to Carr’s question, “Is Google making us stupid?”, well maybe not stupid, but something besides ourselves whether that transition be for the better or for the worse. It can either turn one into an unthinking robot or an enhanced human being. It is for the individual person to decide just how the internet will affect them.
Reading the different media associated with this paper set me thinking. The article by Nicholas Carr even had me doubting my own eyes; was I even reading the article or simply skimming for the relevant information? I have no idea. But I do know that they all brought up interesting points, community being one of them. Having read a lot about community in my freshman reading, I like to think I’m an expert on different types of community. But I wouldn’t have dreamt of relating community to the Internet. According to Jodi Dean, the Internet community is a term relating to relationships formed over the Internet and carried out through long conversations – I presume using chat rooms but could also be formed over Facebook or the equivalent. How exactly can one form a relationship over the Internet? I understand how one can keep a relationship alive through messages and comments, but forming an entirely new relationship seems impossible. How can you know what someone is really like through a chat, without seeing them face-to-face? Which leads to my next point, from Carr’s article. He mentions that the language we use over the Internet is different to the language of conversation or written text you see in books. If this is so, then how can anyone hold an intellectual conversation over instant messaging, when all the messages would be in abbreviated blurbs and void of any significant meaning? Significant meaning to me is a discussion involving topics of importance to the people involved, their beliefs and opinions. I can assure you meaningful conversation does not take place in many of these settings, but I can’t speak for all the chat rooms out there. I personally don’t think you can really get to know someone all that well through a chat room, because it’s impossible to judge a person’s character through a key board and screen, “plenty of human contact, but no humanity” (Clifford Stoll 1995:43). Chat rooms in general I find a little questionable. Jodi Dean remarks on the growth of the chat room phenomenon, but the examples she used I think speak for themselves. The creepy guys that take over the rooms and make everyone feel uncomfortable, and the ones that use fake names to impersonate people are the types that make chat rooms totally unwelcome places. I personally tried using chat rooms years ago as a means of communicating with my friends, and not only were they complex but the vulgarity used in them made me quit immediately. After reading Carr’s article, I was immediately paranoid. The computer that I’m typing this essay on is influencing the way I read, think and speak. Why is there not more research on this? But if there was such research, would I read it in a scientific article, or on a website? How much does this Internet lingo hinder my brains way of thinking? I rather liked the anecdote by a writer who said that since research is now so simple over the Internet, he no longer needs to devote hours to scouring through complex texts when he can use a search engine and find the information in minutes. How often have I used search engines on the library computers instead of reaching for a book? My teachers insisted we used all the data we had at our fingertips, which I literally thought would be my keyboard. Little did I know my ability to read vast paragraphs would be damaged. Google in itself makes me paranoid. The fact that the creators are trying to turn it into artificial intelligence terrifies me. Why Google needs to be advanced anymore is beyond me, when I can Google myself and get thousands of results (none of me, thankfully, but many other “Jenna Allen” candidates pop up), pertain an email address through Google, and even Google map an address. In the Google mindset, it is believed that the more information we have access to, and the faster we can get this information, the more productive thinkers we become. Which, in effect, is exactly the opposite of what Carr is trying to argue. Interesting. Jay D. Bolter begins by discussing identity as it relates to the Internet. What is an Internet identity? Well with other media, such as television, our identity is the way we respond to the what’s in front of us. With the Internet, supposedly our identity is formed by the way we visit and interact with sites. We use the media around us to help identify who we are. I guess this would relate directly to Facebook in the sense that the page you create has pictures of you, your interests and friends and hobbies and favorite music. It is a little introduction to the person you are, or would like to be. Because you can quite easily display yourself in any context that you would like, effectively changing the way people see you. So is there are link between Bolter’s theory of identity and Carr’s theory of stupidity? Perhaps. My generation are using sites like Facebook more and more, to the point were it could be classified as a sort of addiction. Rarely do these users write in long, thoughtful prose, instead cutting down their writing to the bare bones. This ‘bare bones’ writing style is in fact what Carr is referring to, the inability to write anymore. I like Carr’s article the most, because it brings up a series of different yet valid point that all set me thinking; what if instead of my reading ability progressing, it’s actually declining? If Google does produce artificial intelligence that can think as well or better than a human, what does that mean for us humans? What if we already have declined so much in intelligence that we ourselves are no better than an unfeeling robot? If the world is becoming like I-Robot, I fear for us all. Put too much trust in the machines, and your humanity slowly leaks away. Here’s to putting down the computer, and picking up a big intricately written book.
In today’s society, where super-computers reign and it seems as if everything can be solved with the click of a mouse, the acts of reading and writing seem to be relics of the past. Ask a high school senior what the last book she read was (not counting school books) and she may look at you as if you just asked her to write a ten page paper in Mandarin. So the question is, who takes the blame for the apparent decline in reading for our generation? Although this question seems simple enough, the answer is far more complicated than you would imagine because of one word which has managed to transform a generation: the Internet. The Internet is a valuable tool that is utilized by everyone from elementary school students to senior citizens; in this way, it can be seen as a link between generations, a sort of “community” that connects people in ways that were previously unimaginable. It can also be argued that the Internet promotes reading, as millions of people read blogs, news articles, and other online posts daily. Although this seems to be a positive attribute of the Web, this supposed online “reading” has gradually decreased both the depth and perception of the human brain as stated in Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr’s article focuses on this negative aspect of the Internet and its effect on human thinking and interpretation skills. In his article, Carr states that: “Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged” (58). He blames this fact on the Internet and the style of reading and writing that it promotes. The Web is so popular because of its convenience; a person can scan the headlines of a webpage in a matter of two minutes and know what is going on in the world, or at least know a brief synopsis of what’s going on. Reading the newspaper takes far too much time to fit into the busy schedules of today’s working class citizens. So, in a sense, we are trading in our ability to think and read deeply for the convenience of saving ten minutes of our precious time. Carr is skeptical of this idea and is wary of the human brain’s progression towards artificiality. Although Carr seems to have a pessimistic outlook on the Web, there are others who manage to see the Internet in a more positive light. In Unspun, author Jodi Dean concentrates on the Internet as a center of community, a place in which people of different ethnicities, races, genders, and backgrounds can come together without the burden of their differences getting in the way. Dean supports this openness of the Web in his article in Unspun: “Rheingold uses the term ‘public,’ implying that a virtual community has a kind of openness and accessibility that distinguishes it from more private forms of affiliation such as those in the family and workplace” (6). This quote shows how the Internet can provide an unbiased community because its members cannot see each other; therefore, they cannot know whether or not another person in the group is male or female, black or white, handicapped or not. However, there are two sides to every argument, and this brings about the question of truth online. “If we couldn’t see who we were talking to, how could we trust them? How could we be sure who we were talking to?” (Dean 10) This point is especially relevant today, when sexual predators online are revealed every day. It can be seen that Dean’s view of the Internet is quite different from the view of Carr, although there is one major similarity which I will address later on. Jay David Bolter, like Dean, has a more positive opinion of the Web in his article “Identity” in Unspun. Bolter argues that the Internet allows us “to construct our identities in and through the sites that we create as well as those that we visit” (17). Essentially, we can be whoever we want to be while on the Web. This fact can be seen in two lights, however, and Bolter mentions both in his article. The positive light: we have the freedom and ability to recreate ourselves online and be in a community that accepts us because it cannot see our physical appearance. This can be extremely liberating for handicapped individuals or others who are often teased because of their disabilities or appearances in the physical world. The virtual world becomes like a safe haven for them, a world in which they are not judged for what is on the outside. The negative light: our identity cannot be truly shown in a world where half the people are being untruthful about their own identities. If we can constantly change things about ourselves on the Web, then it is not a true community made up of true identities. Although it seems that we can become someone new while online, it really is impossible to completely separate the physical world from the virtual world. As stated in Bolter’s article: “Cyberspace simply becomes another arena for the complex social negotiations of our culture. Cultural theorists argue that we can never truly erase markers such as race and gender because they constitute our identity” (28). No matter how hard we try to make ourselves feel “at home” in online communities, it will still be a lie because you can never really know someone else on the Internet. After reviewing all three articles, it seems as if each one is entirely different from the next. Carr concentrated more on the intellectual aspect of the Internet, Dean centered in on the social perspective, and Bolter dealt with the individual side of the Web. Although their focuses were on different areas of the online world, one major theme permeated through all three articles: the theme of isolation caused by the Internet. This is a surprising theme, at least to me, because at first glance it seems as if the Web is place of connection and unity, a tool that is capable of bringing together people from all around the globe, of all different ages and races. However, after reading these three articles, it is apparent that our society is slowly isolating ourselves from the real, physical world through the use of excessive technology: mainly, the Internet. Carr’s argument shows how humans are isolating themselves from the physical world of books and newspapers because of time. There isn’t enough time in the day to actually sit down and focus on reading a book or articles in a newspaper; instead, we feel the need to condense these things into five minute intervals of scanning a news page or blog online. This may seem like a harmless, time-saving tool at first, but after weeks of “scanning” as a daily routine, it becomes a habit and slowly starts to isolate our minds from the intellectual world. Concentration becomes a burden, actually reading a book becomes nearly impossible—we slowly begin to lose some of the few characteristics that make us human and separate us from the super-computers. Similarly, Dean’s article brings up this point of isolation from society. This is probably the most surprising of all, considering his article is titled “Community.” However, a philosopher Slavoj Zizek states that: “The use of computers as a tool ‘to rebuild community results in the building of a community inside the machine, reducing individuals to isolated monads, each of them alone’” (Dean 5). Although the Web is supposed to be a connective tool, it can backfire and end up isolating us from others in both the real world and the virtual world. I feel as though an online community is an oxymoron, mainly because you really don’t know the people around you. When I think of a community, I think of my neighborhood at home—how everyone will help you out if you need it: lend you some sugar, take in your mail while you are on vacation, or water your plants if you’re sick. Would you really trust someone you met on the Internet in the same way? This point leads right into Bolter’s article “Identity.” If you can constantly change who you are online, you become a fleeting identity and are basically alone. People can’t recognize your real identity in the virtual world or your virtual identity in the real world. In conclusion, we must be careful as to how much we rely on the Internet as a source of connectivity, because in the end, it may end up isolating us from civilization completely. A tool with so much influence in our society must be viewed with caution so that it doesn’t overtake our world and make us lose all of them remarkable things that characterize our humanity.
Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” argues that the revolution of the internet changes the human thought process, making people dependent on instant gratification and thus less capable of drawing conclusions for themselves. Jodi Dean and Jay Davis Bolter both make valid points in Unspun to generalize the effect of technology and, specifically the internet, on people. Their works, Community and Identity, respectively, provide information about the internet to support Carr’s stance. Though Dean, Bolter and Carr make separate arguments in their works, there are three common themes: Influence of the media, redefinition of the self and liberation from the physical. These themes all combine to further support Carr’s fear: the rise of computers and their eventual transcendence of humans. The Internet has been widely used as a tool for marketing. Advertisements and pop-ups fill pages to promote products and shape consumers. Carr notes that a person’s web history can be tracked so as to help advertisers appeal to that individual’s interests. Bolter states that, “web consumers begin to take on identities that follow them through their journeys in cyberspace” (20). If multiple web pages have similarities in content, advertisers will know what products to show to target customers. The marketing industry can begin to shape consumers as they want them. Dean refers to the term, “cookie” with respect to computers. Fooling people with their warm and friendly title, cookies plant information in computer files, tracking site history and promoting e-commerce. Carr connects advertisements to his theme by saying that they appear all over in television, newspapers and magazines. As people become less patient readers, advertisements take the place of words as stories become shorter. Bolter’s comment on identity is the second point shared by the authors. With changes in the internet and technology, people, too, begin to change their own identities. One of Carr’s examples for his argument is the change in reading styles. People no longer sit and read books, pages, uninterrupted. They would much rather prefer clicking through a few links to find the information they need instantly. As far as identity, this shows that people adapt to new technologies, rather than integrate them into their lives. Rarely do people open dictionaries before googling words. Google is not even a verb, yet when used as such most people would understand the meaning because they adapt. Dean emphasizes that people skew their image when trying to communicate with strangers virtually. They lie about their true identities and take on false ones to meet people and fulfill a sense of belonging. If people cannot identify themselves as individuals and have their own thoughts then what will differentiate people from other people, or, ultimately, as feared by Carr, people from machines. Finally all three writers say that the internet liberates people from the physical, allowing them to transcend their bodies. People can be whoever they want to be in a virtual world. No one knows anyone else’s true age, race, gender, disability or identity altogether. Dean refers to the virtual community as a “community of mind.” Not only is identity changing through the use of technology and the internet, but people can choose to manipulate it in order to know others. There are no physical boundaries that, as in real life, may inhibit a person. Dean discusses how people feel the need to belong and are in search of communities. These communities, however, cannot truly exist because they are not comprised of people with similar interests. When online, people take on different personas in order to make connections with others. Bolter explains the concept of how creating a homepage can put a person on the same level as someone far more prominent, well-known or well-off. Carr references “intellectual technologies” as those which exceed the physical and are for our minds. The ability for one to feel outside of their body allows their mind to flow through the network of information on the web. In the virtual world, no one is distinguished by physical or real life characteristics. As with changing identity, the feeling of a separated body and mind could minimize differences between humans and computers. A topic that both Bolter and Carr discuss in great detail is the concept of artificial intelligence (AI). Carr draws the conclusion that AI is the future of technology; that the final goal of all recent advancements is to create a more systematic and efficient way of life. He fears the desire to replace the human mind with that of a computer. People will no longer be asked to think critically or exercise their own brains. Bolter discusses the comparison of the human mind to a program running on the brain, which could eventually be replaced by actual software running on machines. As of now, people use the internet as a social tool as well as an informational crutch. People are gaining dependence on the web to provide information, though they still can function on their own. There is, however, the possibility in the future that machines will surpass humans. Carr promotes the idea of reading printed pages and drawing conclusions individually to keep our minds sharp, rather than being given answers by a machine. If cognitive skills are not practiced they will become challenging, inconvenient or frustrating and eventually, nonexistent with the rise of machines. Both Dean and Bolter’s works provide arguments that support Carr’s original point: the current prominence of the Internet reduces human cognitive skills as they become dependent on the web for information and instant gratification. Carr fears the eventual replacement of the mind by artificial intelligence and of humans by computers. Media influence, changing identity and liberation from physical factors, as discussed by the three authors, all provide reason to believe that this fate is plausible. With more marketing ads online, words become fewer and people’s attention spans for reading shorten. Internet users adjust their own identities to what the media portrays as an ideal consumer and they modify themselves with technological advancements. People also extend themselves to outside the parameters of their bodies, becoming a mind among the web. People are adapting to technology and becoming less differentiable from each other. Cognitive skills and critical thinking are declining with the rise of computers and without any efforts for change Carr’s fear could very well become reality.
“To go where no man has gone before” was the mission statement of the Starship Enterprise in the widely popular science fiction television series Star Trek. The idea has been transcendent throughout human culture from forging new paths through foreign lands, to landing on the moon, and now to the invention and exploration of manmade, digital landscapes. The Internet has become a staple in our high speed, high tech world appearing now in many personal electronics apart from the pc. However, the new shift in human culture is causing much despair among philosophers trying to predict the possible outcomes of such a dramatic alteration. Some implications these philosophers are warning against include societal degradation with spoofed identities, pornography and uncensored expletives, a reconfiguration of the brain that could replace book reading with power browsing, and some even to the extreme of loss of identity. Even with all of these warnings though, each of these thinkers has something uniquely positive to say about the Web and its rapidly expanding influence. Nicholas Carr, a writer/philosopher, recently wrote an article for The Atlantic where he expressed his opinions on the dawning digital age. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think,” he said in light of his newly developed reading habits. He claims that no longer does he have the patience to sit and read a full article, let alone a book. He says his brain now expects information to come in a Web-like format that is quick and concise. Furthering this claim, he suggests that by participating in this style of reading, he has lost his capacity for deep thinking. “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” There are obvious benefits to easily accessible information. Research time needed has rapidly decreased with text and Google searches, all information is in one place not spread over volumes of books, and it’s portable. In addition, the internet has not only increased the speed of information transactions, it has exponentially expanded the volume of that information as well. Despite its usefulness, Carr still worries about his and the general human loss of deep, critical thinking as a result of this information revolution. As deduced from his reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey the real concern is that humankind will gradually become more robotic in their thought, as computers with artificial intelligence are developed to closer resemble humans. If this happened and the human capacity for deep thought was indeed lost, what would prevent the computers from fully replacing humans? Luckily, Jodi Dean, coauthor of the book Unspun has a positive retort. Throughout her research of Web-based communities, she has developed an opinion that suggests that the involved web users are not becoming automatons, in fact quite the opposite. She says that Web-based community is “infused with feeling, emotion, and affect,” and in fact could not function was that not the case. In her chapter, she cites that communities are aggregate and not merely a sum of their parts, but that the people actually “feel an obligation to something beyond themselves.” A web community she says can function normally without any one of its members, though some members are more important to the community than others and could thus have a greater impact upon their exit. Another important benefit to these communities was the open exchange of ideas with people of similar attributes as opposed to previous communities where the sole association may have been geographic. Dean has her own concerns about the internet, though. The early internet was populated not with groups for open discussion or recipe exchange as it promised, but with pornography and delinquency. According to her, these pose potential hazards as it could easily degrade the societal standards and place children at risk of exposure. Since then however, the Internet largely has become the things that it once promised housing political groups of all sorts, as many recipes as one can imagine, and endless banks of information. And while pornography and delinquency still run rampant, the problems are much less noticeable because they can be easily blocked or avoided for those not wishing to experience them. Another author of Unspun, Jay David Bolter disagrees. Dean’s sense of emotional web communities can be easily unraveled by the incidents with spoofed identities. He views the benefits of the internet to be largely based in commerce. Advertisements cover the new face of the Web and thanks to cookies and other tracking applications, they can be specifically targeted at consumers likelier to buy their products. This system contributes to the safety concern that Dean expressed by targeting pornography towards porn viewers only. Bolter seems to hold mixed feelings about certain things though. With the advent of the webcam and sites like Youtube, instant fame is made possible by the potential millions of viewers, however, especially webcams seem to cheapen real identity by being on display constantly in some cases. Identity is also fading with the idea that one can never know who is on the other side of cyberspace. He hypothesizes that this is just a new brand of identity where people have multiple, malleable self representations all over the internet. He also supports Carr’s point that artificial intelligence is very like the human mind and has been likened to such since its invention in the 1940’s. But to contradict Carr, he says that the source of media helps to define our identities, but does not fully infiltrate them. Perhaps there is no knowing what the impact of computers will be on the human race. Carr does make a hefty argument however that when writing was invented and Socrates said it would take away free thought and memory, he was right. And when people spoke out against the printing press saying people would become intellectually lazy constantly having books on hand, they were correct. He also however, concedes that writing and the printing press has unseen benefits that far outweighed their criticisms. He thus makes room for the same concession with respect to “power browsing” as having unforeseen benefits that current defenders of the printed word cannot yet know. One thing can be known and that is the effects that the internet have already had. The style of reading is changing, identities will be spoofed, and pornography is as rampant as ever. What cannot be known, are the long term effects of this on humankind. Will nearly infinite access to information and communication at all times hyper-develop human society or will it rob us of our power to think critically? Will computers and humans merge and become automatons or cyborgs? Will some unseen collective consciousness or super-being arise from the implantation of technology into the human mind? Clearly there will be downfalls, the gamble in the situation is what the potential benefits are and whether they will outweigh the costs. Unfortunately though, time is necessary to determine any of these things and all that can be done is wait.
Both the essay “Identity” and the essay “Community” share the common theme of redefining social interaction through the use of the World Wide Web. In “Identity”, the previous generation’s cultural identity is turned on its’ ear through use of the World Wide Web. Where once people could define themselves through television shows and radio programs now can have a more hands on approach by designing their own personal website or hosting a webcam. “Community” also brings to light how much the World Wide Web has changed the way people interact. Originally, a community was a group of people who lived near each other or were part of the same organization. Now the World Wide Web allows “relationships between those who are not already linked by tradition, proximity, profession, or affiliation” (Dean, 2000). In summation, the two essays don’t necessarily say that the classic idea of community and identity are dead, but they have definitely been changed and broadened by the World Wide Web. Another key point that both “Identity” and “Community” share is the idea of separating the physical body from the ideas it presents. In everyday life, physical beauty matters a lot more than it should. The idea implied in both essays is that for once, ideas are not inhibited by the looks of the people expounding them. Communities that blossomed on the World Wide Web “transcended the very limits of the body…one didn’t respond to anther on the basis of appearance, but the basis of ideas.” (Dean, 2000) In the essay on Identity, MUDs are discussed at length. While very dorky, MUDs allowed people to express themselves while not being chained to their physical appearance. In these “Multi User Dungeons” people could become whatever character they liked, real or imaginary, to interact however they saw fit. It is clear that in both essays, the authors feel that the World Wide Web allowed people to express themselves freely like never before. “Identity” and “Community” also briefly touch upon the dark sides of the World Wide Web. While the World Wide Web is a brilliant new tool, it isn’t a utopia and both essays talk a little bit about the lying, hacking and pornography included in the cyber world. In “Community” it is stated that the World Wide Web is home to “every kind of pornography imaginable…(and) teenagers exchanging banalities and expletives.” (Dean, 2000) While separating appearance from ideas is clearly a positive thing, both essays touch upon the unwanted by product of this, deception. When no one knows your true identity, it’s very easy to lie about who you are. In “Identity”, Bolter states it is a widely known fact that in “MUD or chat room, no one can verify a participant’s age or gender.” (Bolter, 2000) While sometimes this sense of deception is part of the fun, sometimes it can also go very, very wrong. An example of deception not being part of the fun games would be, “interactions with a caring woman, disfigured and disabled following a car crash, turned about to be exchanges with an able bodied man.” (Rheingold 1993:165) Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, seems to have very little connection on the surface to the two articles previously discussed from Unspun. They don’t cover the same topics and the similarity really isn’t very overt. Although 8+ years seperates these two articles, there is a similar theme in both. Both essays are written with wonder and slight fear of the technology to come. In “Identity” and “Community” topics are presented that at the time are cutting edge; webcams, chat rooms, MUDs, homepages. Comparisons are made, and while not explicitly state, the authors wonder if these things are changing our traditional sense of community and identity. Fast forward 8 years, and all of things covered in these two articles are either commonplace or even obsolete to our current generation of internet users. Now there is a whole new field of concerns in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Now that people are no longer amazed by the idea of an internet community, concerns are now being raised about the internet destroying our ability to concentrate and the idea of one day creating a super AI computer. The conclusion that can be drawn is that there will always be something down the road that is new enough and different enough to merit an essay being written about it. The two essays featured in Unspun differ from each other in the way they are set up. The essay on “Community” is organized a bit like a historical piece; it makes sense having it as the first essay in the book. The essay outlines the history of communities on the World Wide Web from the very first primal bulletin board systems in the 70s and 80s to the more advanced “third phase” of communities in the 1990s. In “Identity”, the topics are laid out just as they are, topics relating to identity. The essay covers webcams, homepages, and MUDs as ways of defining one’s identity on the internet. The essay “Community” seems a lot more jaded than the essay “Identity”. In some parts of “Community” there is overwhelming positivity about the idea of community on the internet, but other parts it becomes more pessimistic. “Computers have become tools of the people, but the people aren’t using them to transform society in progressive directions” (Dean, 2000). This statement reads much like Thomas Hobbes wrote it in the view that when people are left to their own devices, things will inevitably all go to hell. “Identity” on the other hands sees the World Wide Web in a more optimistic light. They see it as a wonderful place where people can express themselves through webcams or homepages; a place where people can experiment with different writing styles and personalities. I think if Jodi Dean could make a rebuttal to Jay David Bolter’s John Locke type view of the internet she would have a few things to say. She would say yes, some people use webcams and homepages to express themselves, but many more use them to post pornography or degrading insults. She would say that all of those different writing styles and personalities only lead to people deceiving others about their true identities and manipulating them.
“As we come to rely on the computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence” (Carr), states Nicholas Carr at the conclusion of his article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?". A powerful statement, Carr’s article develops on an idea that has been evolving for several years, in sync with the rapid expansion of the Internet- mainly, upon the issue that asks if humans are becoming increasingly more dependant on the Internet, as it so readily and easily provides information. Although Carr’s article focuses on the negative influences of the Internet on society, there have been other authors who feel that the Internet has had majorly beneficial effects. In "Unspun: Key Concepts for Understanding the World Wide Web", several authors come together to comment on how the Internet is affecting society in a more positive way. Jodi Dean elaborates on the sense of community that can be found on the Internet, as Jay David Bolter touches upon the feeling of identity that one can achieve from the Internet. Although they have differing opinions on the subject, all three authors make extremely valid points. Dean’s opinion on the Internet is that it fosters a sense of community unlike anything previously experienced. She claims that “computers were celebrated for the ability to facilitate grassroots connection, for their capacity to revitalize connections between people and give them new opportunities to share, debate, and engage” (Dean). On the other hand, Carr’s article makes the claim that it is becoming increasingly more impossible for those who use the Internet to foster these connections, as their functions to ‘share, debate, and engage’ are deteriorating. Carr writes, “our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged” (Carr). Similarly, Dean does agree somewhat with some of Carr’s statements on the impersonal nature of the Internet when she writes “the warmth may not be there. The continuity of attachment may be lacking. Self-interest may usually override a feeling of community”, however she concludes her findings with the idea that “the sense of being a part of something larger does accompany community on the Web” (Dean), therefore saying that the sense of community established on the Internet could possibly be more beneficial, which contradicts statements Carr makes in his article concerning the negative impact of the Internet. In accordance with Dean’s arguments, Bolter makes statements about personal identity on the Internet that also contradict Carr’s opinions as presented in his article. Bolter believes that the Internet is ultimately an extension of the identities we posses as individuals in real life: “electronic technologies of communication cannot ultimately deny our embodied identities, Instead, our culture is using these technologies to examine the meaning of embodiment-to explore how we choose to represent our embodied identities to others and ourselves” (Bolter). Although Bolter makes a valid point, the majority of Carr’s article is makes several points on the idea that the Internet is turning society into constant plugged-in robots with a dependance on technology, especially the Web. Carr himself claims that he can no longer remain focused on reading, saying “my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages” (Carr). This should raise some concerns about the negative effects of the Internet, as Carr is clearly an educated and well-read individual. However, it is important to note the large difference between the publishing dates of each work and how this could affect each author’s opinion on the subject of the Internet. "Unspun" was published in 2000, when the Internet was popular but nowhere near the advanced level it is today, Carr’s article was published eight years later in 2008. At the alarming rate the Internet expands, changes have undoubtedly been made that would greatly impact each argument if it was written in another time. For example, Dean and Bolter both believe that the Internet fosters a sense of community and identity, through interaction with other people on the Web. However, it has become more apparent (eight years in the future) that there are many dangerous people- such as predators, scammers, and liars- on the Internet, and one must be as safe as possible when interacting with others.
Community, by definition, is “a unified body of individuals”(Merriam Webster, 2007). Mass amounts of people have connected with others, forming huge cyber reality communities with people who otherwise would not have been connected. The question becomes how realistic these communities are able to become. In a real world community, people connect with one another based on their location and what they have in common because of this location. People get to know their neighbors and share similar worries and concerns about things inside of their community. People often make connections with others based on similar interests inside of this community. Cyber communities are also very similar to this. People are able to connect based on thoughts and ideas. People who are thousands of miles away from each other are able to share opinions on thoughts on commonalities they have. The restriction of distance is no longer there. However, there are certain things that are missing in a cyber community, and ultimately the biggest thing is feeling. In cyber communities it is difficult to get a true emotional connection to these people that you are, many times, unable to see or talk to in person. For one thing, according to Nicholas Carr in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid, people are rarely immersing themselves into online sources of information. People are more likely to skim the page, get what they need to find, and be done with reading the web page. This form of researching is very similar to how people are connecting to these cyber communities. Without the comfort of being around people physically, it could be difficult to truly connect and get emotionally involved with the community in cyber space. People may join a community, share some thoughts, find what they need to find from other people in the cyber community, and leave whenever they want to. The fact that people can leave whenever they want to is very different from real communities, where you are physically at tied down to wherever your home may be. You are physically connected with this community, and whether you like it or not, it is much harder to get away from these people than it is to get away from the cyber community. The physical component is missing in cyber reality, and that is why there is such a difference. In the “Google” article Maryanne Wolf, a psychologist, states “We are not only what we read, we are how we read.” This also goes for how we form communities. It is not who we form the communal bond with, but it is how. People who only “skim the surface” of these communities, take what they need, and leave are not only hurting the community by not giving back but also hurting themselves by not connecting emotionally with these people. Communities must make connection much deeper than what is found on the surface to become successful. The web is also making a difference in how people identify with themselves and how they identify with others. The web makes it faster, much more efficient to share a blog or to create an autobiographical site and share it with others, therefore sharing your identity and posting it online. The fast past cyber world has thousands of ways to post your personal information and find information on other people. The web is making a difference on how you view yourself and others. Ultimately the web is making it much easier to find and connect with others. It is easier to do research on people and things. It saves time so people are able to do things more efficiently and learn numerous things at once. This does save time but it effects how people think about themselves. People are no longer thinking critically of who they are as people and how to best identify themselves. In a physical community, people are identified as a certain race, a certain hair color, a certain gender, and so on. When using the web, one does not need to enclose this sort of information if they don’t want to. People are able to identify with ideas and thoughts, which sounds like a good idea. For example, in the pre web world it was necessary to physically write what you wanted to share with others. This took time and effort. Using the web you are able to share who you are with people in minimal time and effort. This advantage is huge in today’s society which lives at such a fast pace in the physical world. It is almost necessary to get involved somehow in the World Wide Web because everyone else is. However, our cyber space identities are used very often by companies trying to market their products. People are constantly being barraged with advertisements that are able to track what they do and where they go. Identities essentially are being created for them based on what sites they visit and what they do there. Our identities are being used to sell products and find other customers to sell to. Because of the constant “stalking” of these marketers, we are given less time to create our own identity using the web. Because of this people are unable to attempt to connect with others to try to join and fully appreciate a cyber community without the fear of marketers. The superficial identity takes over, and people are just pawns of the marketing world on the web. Not only is this the case but people are not thinking as critically as who they are as people. By using the web to create and share their identity people may attract people they did not intend to. They may be sharing information with people they do not want to share with. The connections may become superficial, making the identities involved superficial as well. Thinking uncritically of connections you make and how you make them can make the brain think differently about why you make connections with people. This can ultimately effect the connections you make in the physical world, as well as the cyber world. As long as people are identifying with others and creating a community, people will always have to rely on trust. It is necessary to trust the people in the community, because without it, you are unable to make clear connections with anyone. Trusting in a physical world can be tricky. People lie, cheat, and steal in the physical world. People can abuse your trust. However, in the cyber world, it can be even more difficult to catch these liars. As Dean describes, Joan, a member of CompuServe, was not only not a Joan, but a man named Alex. The people that befriended Joan felt very hurt and very betrayed (Unspun, page 11). In a cyber community, when we look at someone’s web page or talk to them via the internet, we trust that they are telling us the truth. These people could very well be lying to us. This abuse of trust can hurt us physically, even if it is in the cyber world. When joining a cyber community people should feel confident and safe speaking with others and sharing ideas and thoughts with the other members of the community, but it can be difficult. The idea of a cyber community is very idealistic. If it worked, it would be great. People being honest with who they are and sharing ideas with others who have similar interests. It could connect vast numbers of people, ignoring any physical boundaries that were between them. People could make real connections with others. It essentially could help people find their true identity, as well as their cyber identity. The web may be on the way to something like this happening, but if it continues to move at such a fast pace then it may be near impossible. It is sad to say this but people today should be skeptical of who they meet on the web. They should be careful of the information they put out onto the web. They do not know who will be able to gain access to their information. People should be careful of how they make a connection with people on the web, because it can greatly affect how they interact and make connections in the real world.
In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Nicholas Carr focuses on the Net and the impact it is having on not only on our thoughts, but also on how we think about ideas and why we think about them. It would seem that a constant influx of information that compels us to learn about everything and anything would help to educate and propel us towards a new era of enlightenment. However, this constant bombardment of information does the exact opposite. With so much information at the tips of our fingers, or rather the click of a mouse, our attention spans have dwindled and we no longer focus on the deeper meaning of what we read, if we read at all. Instead we dehumanize the emotions behind the written word and merely skim for the highlights of articles, abstracts, or stories. Carr worries that the influence the Internet has on our ability to read, comprehend concepts, and analyze topics will be detrimental. Carr is not the only one to notice the changes the Internet has on the way we think and act. While Carr focuses on the effects the Web has on intelligence, reading, and the way in which our brains process information, Dean approaches the human connection the Internet provides, or rather hinders. Both Carr and Dean admit there are benefits to the Internet and the doors it opens, whether in the real or virtual world. They both worry on how much change will occur under its influence. Jodi Dean focuses on the difference between real life communities that emerge on the Web. The term “emerge” is appropriate because such communities spring into being from nothing more than a common interest or the simple fact that the members of such a community were online at the same time. Dean contrasts Internet “cookies” found through online communities with the cookies in the more traditional sense. The former actually describes tracking devices found in online communities that help track your Web activities. This tracking device system is brought up as well in the Identity article by Bolter. By tracking a user’s progress through the Web, a website can tailor its ads to the person’s online interests. The fact that online communities are not simply a way to facilitate communication between individuals who already know one another in the flesh, who are already bound to one another through similar backgrounds, traditions, or geographic locations, but rather associated through online relationships between strangers “infused with feeling, emotion, and affect”. This is a point that Carr makes when discussing Community that Carr completely overlooks. Dean differs from Carr in that he recognizes the feeling that online users put into their communities. In his article, Carr describes the characters in the film 2001. When the characters disassemble the supercomputer “HAL”, they do so in a robotic way, seemingly devoid of all emotion. This worries Carr, who fears that eventually computers and the Internet will cause the emotional and intellectual side of humans to deteriorate. Dean finds in the online communities he studies evidence that this is not yet happening, and may never happen. Although the Internet may have a dismal affect on the thought processes of humans, it certainly does not have the same affect on their emotional processes, at least not yet. Carr cites that HAL, the supercomputer, seems to have the most emotion during the end of the film. This may be so, but Carr overlooks the fact that feelings are necessary for an online community to continue. If the bloggers or other members of the community are not passionate or emotionally connected with the subject of their community there would be no reason for them to continue as a part of it. This indeed can occur, in which case they would simply leave the community. The fact that online communities are thriving is evidence enough that emotion and feeling are still connected with the Web. Communities online began as a promise of “meaningful, personal interconnection”. However, it is apparent that while that was the original concept, the very spirit of a community, the bond of being “in it together” is gone due to the fact that users can log on and off whenever boredom strikes. Users can be thrown out of communities more quickly than Road Runner can connect you to the Internet. The sense of “togetherness” seems to be lost, no matter how hard users try to recreate it online.There are downfalls to online communities, which can be seen every time a new user logs onto the Internet. Communities go beyond the physical body. Once online you can be whoever you want. The problem is so can others. There is no way to shield yourself, your identity from people once you are online. Jay David Bolter speaks about the ways in which the World Wide Web allows individuals to construct their own identities through sites that others can view online. This can go along the same lines with Carr’s fears on how the Internet changes how our minds function. If the Internet can influence and change the way we think, act, and even how we define ourselves, who’s to say who we actually are anymore. If we no longer think for ourselves and we let the Internet take over our identity, what is left? Bolter and Carr agree that thought processes and Identity are being redefined. Carr discusses the many distractions that we face while connected to the internet and the shorter attention spans we subsequently possess. Readers have turned into “power browsers” and now turn to the Internet to avoid reading in the traditional sense altogether. In the education system it is important to slow this abandonment of traditional research and reading. There are ways to be such research is not lost, by making requirements such as having only two references for a research paper be from an Internet Source. Carr and Bolter both agree that expressing ourselves or gathering information is not enough to form who we are. The way in which we read and express ourselves plays a large role in the formation of our mind and identity. The style and speed at which we read will affect what information we pick up and store. The more we rely on the Internet the closer our minds are being shaped to resemble algorithmic artificial intelligence models. Carr fears that if the Google Corporations experiments involving artificial intelligence come together with the already changing ways in which we think, our own intelligence will deflate into artificial intelligence. If our brains ever were supplemented or replaced by an artificial intelligence it would be a fake and incomprehensive intelligence supplement. Bolter lists that the analytical and rational aspects of the human mind would be lost. It is impossible to tell what kind of long term effects the Internet will have on our sense of community, identity, and the ways in which our minds process our thoughts because there are no research results on the subject as of yet. This is due to the rapid evolution the Internet has undergone in the past decade. We are the first generation that will have lived with computers and the Internet our entire lives. I was given my first email address in the first second grade, and even earlier than that I would experience the Internet and other computer technology with my father. As the Internet evolved around our generation, I received my own website and as a teenager began participating in social networks and instant messaging systems. Our generation will be the first example of what it is like to think, read, and research with the full impact of the Internet affecting us our entire lives. Carr is right in worrying that this new technology will be detrimental to the way in which we experience reading novels, articles, research papers, and even long Internet postings. Dean and Bolter are in agreement that although the Internet can supply a sense of community and identity, there is a cost. There is a loss of human connection when the Internet mediates all interactions between two people, or a certain group. In today’s society most teenagers do not read as much as teens and other children did in the early nineties and earlier. Carr’s article asks the question “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, and while it may seem that way to other generations who have not experienced an entire lifetime of the Internet, it seems that there is merely a revolution occurring in the ways in which people think and act. Along with Dean and Bolter’s research on community and identity, Carr should rephrase his question so it reads “Is Google Propelling Positive or Negative Change in Our World”. There is no doubt that the Internet is influencing our generation and changes are beginning to take place. The real question is whether it is the fault of the Internet or the fault of the individual. It is possible to focus deeply on a long novel without breaks. There are individuals in our generation that are completely connected to the Internet and all it has to offer, changes in our thought processes included, that retain the ability to think intellectually and maintain an attention span longer than one minute. If it is possible to maintain emotion and your identity, then it is possible to resist or work with the changes the Internet is introducing into our lives. As Carr stated, he may be simply a skeptic form an older generation. There were those who doubted the television and other technological advances. It all depends on how we as individuals handle the Internet and how much we allow it to change our way of thinking. Google may not be making us stupid, but it is definitely changing our way of life, and it is only a matter of time before we begin to discover how deep of an impact it truly has on our way of life.
Humans are imperfect and inefficient. Compared to a computer, we are slow and forgetful. We are not a species designed for efficiency. We waste too much time with questions of trivial matters that when answered do not succeed in improving our lives. Humans do not work well together either. Each thinks differently and has individual thoughts that interrupt coherent group thinking. If all of humanity were one big computer, nobody in his or her own mind would want one. However, the Internet essentially is by itself one giant computer created and maintained by humanity. It is also the most used means of communication, and all users of the web effect cyberspace as they would in reality. If the Internet is basically one conflicting and intersecting web, why is it so irresistible and essential to citizens of 21st century society? It may be that the Internet mirrors society in the image that its creators want society of reality to exist. It is a utopia for its creators. It allows an ordinary person to do more with an unlimited potential in cyberspace that that individual could ever imagine doing in reality. God apparently created man in His image. Now it is humanity’s turn to play God. Avatar, the replacement for a face actually comes from a Hindu word avatarana, which is the decent of a deity from incarnate form. What could be more enticing than that? This idea of creation is interesting because the potential for creation in an existence where there are no limits is infinite. One actually can be more than one person! Try doing that in a world where you are given one existence. In reality it is pretty hard to change an identity that has been developed over a lifetime. However, on the web, one can create multiple personas. These personas can be of a separate gender, race, age, ect. The counter-argument for this is that these personas are still controlled by a person living in reality. These characters are still extensions of a person. However, the physical aspects of a person do not mean anything on the Internet. Possibly the most intriguing and attractive aspects of cyberspace is that it creates a truly blind society where physical imperfections are not and cannot be judged. The Web is a faceless society due to the fact that a “face” can be changed at will and therefore does not mean anything. The word is even replaced with a new word, avatar. This faceless society while utopian in some ways creates the problem of an anonymous society. Nobody online ever looks anyone in the eye. The face of a creator on the web is essentially what he or she creates. However, creation is still a relative term. Nobody online ever truly sees with his or her own eyes what exists online because existence is undefined on the Internet. Whatever is “seen” has to go through some other form where it is translated by a computer. It is more like human-to-computer-to-undefined reality-computer-to-human interaction than just human interaction. Humans have to adapt to get the most out of this computer translation of the alternate man made universe know as the web. The web is not something that is physical and immersion is limited to what is visible on a small computer screen. In this way the Internet is perfect for human observation. Humans in real life cannot take in every single detail of their world. There are simply too many things. To make things even harder for humanity, reality is always in a state of change. We just simply cannot keep up if we want to take in every detail. The fact that if we just focus on a comparatively tiny computer screen, we can take in every detail without very much effort. Also, unlike in reality we can see exactly what we want immediately without the hassle of making an effort to search for it. The web is all about instant gratification with little effort because it is just so easy. With high speed internet connections, one can surf the web, living in a world that has only what the surfer wants without any of the unwanted “garbage” that is just wasted space and distracts from pure efficiency. Although the Internet creates a world that is tailored for man, man needs to adapt in order to optimize oneself for using the web to its fullest. One must think like a computer. One must think at the speed of light as information is processed and compressed. There is no such thing or need for abstract thinking. Everything is laid out. Even language is compressed for quicker absorption. With high speed Internet, and powerful search engines, users can jump from one page to another in an instant. No longer does the wait of a page loading force the viewer to fully read the page. Nobody can deny that the Internet is an extraordinarily powerful tool and resource that has changed humanity. The question is whether this change is actually good for the human race. As stated earlier, humans are not computers. People trade efficiency for interest. People are slow. When people start to act like computers, they lose their humanity. Humanity isn’t perfect. However, it has done some great things in the past that no computer will ever be able to do. As we “evolve” into cybernetic beings, we lose the essence of our existence. The very definition of creativity is changed. We may be limited by our humanity, but we will be even more limited if we become more like computers.
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Over the last decade, the Internet has become a major player in the way that society works and develops. Although it provides a quick and easy means of accessing information and communicating, the Internet is arguably responsible for a change in the way that people think. However, the debate arises over the amount of control that individual people have while on the Internet.
In his article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr discusses the effect of the internet on the human brain. Carr acknowledges the widespread impact of the Internet, stating, “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” (57). The influence of the Internet is undeniable, yet Carr focuses on the impact that the availability of information has on the way that people work and function. He admits, “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” (57). By having information so readily accessible, there seems to be little need for deep analytical thinking and reading.
Just as the Internet provides a quick way for people to access information, it also presents an easy way for people to connect to other people, as Jodi Dean discusses in her essay, “Community”. Dean emphasizes how simple it is to meet others and interact via the Internet. However, although she recognizes that the Internet can play a major role in building community, she admits that there is some risk to connecting to other online: “the idea that everybody might know your name can be more frightening than reassuring for it suggests the increased surveillance power that the Web provides, enabling someone to find you and uncover your secrets” (4). Dean views the computer as a tool, which can be used as a way to connect to people in a virtual realm. This virtual realm, although lacking in face-to-face interaction, is complex in its own right. Dean goes as far as to say that “Web-based community is infused with feeling, emotion, and affect” (5).
Just as Carr discusses the effect of the Internet on the human mind, so does Dean in relation to building a sense of community. She emphasizes that the Internet can become a world of its own, stating, “On-line, one didn’t know another’s race, ethnicity, or ability. One didn’t respond to another on the basis of appearance, but on the basis of ideas; the virtual community was a community of mind” (9). Rather than connecting to people based on physical attributes, people online can find others who share similar values, ideas, and beliefs. However, this does raise several questions (which Dean acknowledges in her essay) relating to trust issues on the Internet. For example, “How could we be sure who we were talking to? If we couldn’t see who we were talking to, how could we trust them?” (10) Online deception still remains an issue in society today, and threatens the credibility of many social networking sites which were originally created to promote community.
Essentially, Dean’s essay supports the ideas presented in Carr’s article. The way in which people connect on the Internet does affect the way they think. Because of the risk of online deception, people have become more protective of their own personal information, and more wary of people that they meet on the Internet.
Yet another author who discusses the influence of the Internet is Jay David Bolter, although he focuses on the impact of the Web on creating and developing a sense of identity. Bolter begins by addressing the relationship between the impact of the media and the formation of identity, stating, “we employ media in defining both our personal and cultural identities…we become simultaneously both the subject and object of our contemporary media” (17). Due to the fact that much of our contemporary media is dependent on the Internet, it only makes sense that the Web would play a key role in defining the identities of those living and interacting with society today. In fact, Bolter states, “we understand our mediated selves as reformed versions of earlier mediated selves” (18). Bolter conveys the idea that as the Internet begins to influence individual lives more and more, people are more likely to find their identities constantly changing.
However, although Bolter’s view of identity seems to coincide with Carr’s idea that people have lost the ability to think for themselves on the internet, Bolter goes a step further to indicate that people still have full control of the way that they express themselves on the Internet. In discussing the concept of the homepage, Bolter claims, “the Web is a media form in which the individual can take on the role of producer as well as consumer” (20). When creating a homepage, people have the ability to put forth whatever identity they wish others to see; they can control the way that others view them on the Internet, and, in essence, create an online identity which they might not pursue in the real world.
This argument is strengthened by the recent development of webcams, which allow people to self-project their image onto the web, making themselves even more available to others on the Internet. Bolter even states, “The new genre of Webcams allows individuals to bypass that selection process and designate themselves as celebrities” (22). This can be seen throughout society today, and many household names come from people who promote themselves on popular websites, such as YouTube and MySpace. In fact, many Internet stars now find themselves hosting their own reality television shows on networks like MTV, famous for both their Internet status and television reputation. In cases like these, people have used the Internet as a means of taking control over their own lives, using it to their advantage in order to achieve the identity that they want others to perceive.
In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr makes a good argument that people are surrendering to the fast and easy world of the Internet. He states that if we lose the power to control the way that we think and analyze material, “we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture” (63). This is reflected in Dean’s analysis of online communities, in which she relays the idea that people must change the way that they think to adapt to the culture of the Internet.
However, Bolter challenges these ideas when he discusses how people can take control of their own lives via the Internet. He argues that while we must adapt to think appropriately online, it is fundamentally just another way to define ourselves and connect with other people. Rather than losing control of the way that we think, we can define and manipulate the way in which we are seen. Although both sides disagree about the extent of control that we have over the Internet, they agree on the idea that the Internet is an influential resource—something that affects the way we live our daily lives, how we think, and how we define ourselves.
The Impact of the Internet on Aspects of Human Life
Writers Jodi Dean, Jay David Bolter, and Nicholas Carr comment on the rapidity of the internet’s progress as it revolutionizes today’s society. In their respective texts, Dean discusses identity, Bolter discusses community, and Carr discusses the constant availability of information that comes through the internet. Though seemingly unrelated, similarities could be drawn among the works of the three writers. Therefore, Dean and Bolter’s writings could either be used to support or refute the message that Carr portrays through his piece: that the internet is changing the way humans think and is detracting from their ability to contemplate texts and matters in everyday life.
In Jodi Dean’s chapter of Unspun, she focuses on what users consider to be the community aspect of the web. In her text, Dean quotes Howard Rheingold to explain an internet community: “Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (5). Though Dean brings up examples of successful communities like The Well, she also notes examples of internet misconduct. She says that, “many who ventured onto the electronic frontier discovered not the friendly and engaging free-for-all of The Well but a whole new field of dangers and uncertainties. Instead of fascinating debates on politics and the economy, they found teenagers exchanging banalities and expletives; instead of information, they found drivel” like pornography (10). This statement is similar to one of Carr’s when he says, “I’m not thinking the way I used to think” (Is Google Making us Stupid?). Though Carr is not suggesting that the internet is forcing foolishness upon him, the two statements support one another. Dean’s statement suggests to readers that, as people become accustomed to using the web, they explore more and more sites and eventually find satisfaction in the less respectable ones. The reasons that people use the internet begin innocently enough with humans socializing online, but change negatively as time goes on and humans realize what else is available on the web. Carr is also suggesting that the internet is bringing about a change in people. Though the change that Carr notes is not as disreputable as the change that Dean notes, he is still experiencing a change. As Carr continues to use the internet, he finds it difficult to immerse himself “in a book or lengthy article” which, he says, “used to be easy” (Is Google Making us Stupid?). This similarity draws attention to the fact that, in many ways, the internet is changing humans.
Though Dean’s first similarity supports Carr’s claim, there is a second similarity that somewhat discredits his ideas. When Dean contributed her chapter on Community to Unspun, the internet was still in developmental stages. Dean recounts an incident that occurred on a site called LimbdaMOO. On this site, humans are able to create virtual people living in an online community. Apparently, years ago, a member of LimbdaMOO violated other members online, committing such inappropriate acts as rape. As a result of this behavior, security was reinforced on the web, preventing further injustices. Similarly, Carr expresses doubts about his own worries. He notes that, years ago, people feared the development of writing and then the printing press. The relevance of Dean’s LimbdaMOO story in comparison to Carr’s doubts is that there are flaws and reservations about all new ideas when they are first developed. Though LimbdaMOO underwent difficulties in the beginning, the problems were resolved. It is possible that, in time, the advantages to the internet will overshadow the drawbacks, and Carr will have worried needlessly.
Jay David Bolter follows Jodi Dean’s commentary with his own beliefs about cyber identity. In Bolter’s chapter, he explains how a human can go onto the internet and create a new identity for himself. “At any given moment,” he says, “an individual is defined by the connections that she chooses to establish with other individuals, activity groups, and religious and secular organizations. She is, in principle, always free to break these connections and establish new ones…” (26). This idea suggests that, in cyberspace, humans can easily align themselves with one group and can just as easily leave. Humans are able to create and sever ties in no time at all. Carr finds that the internet is causing a similar phenomenon of rapid online searching when he talks about how the internet is “chipping away” one’s “capacity for concentration and contemplation” and also when he talks about how rapidly people view websites when searching for information that pertains to the topic they are studying (Is Google Making us Stupid?). He says, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (Is Google Making us Stupid?). Here, Carr is professing his belief that the web is causing people to explore less. They are no longer becoming interested in everything they come across but are quickly dismissing whatever does not reap immediate benefits. This similarity between Bolter and Carr’s texts supports the idea that the internet is decreasing the amount of time, attention, and depth that humans give. The simplicity of both severing ties within a group and of clicking out of an unhelpful article are direct results of the speed and ease that come with the internet. People expect swiftness in their lives and have learned to embrace it.
Though proven to be similar in the preceding paragraph, Bolter and Carr’s ideas eventually diverge. Despite Carr’s hesitation toward the internet, he does believe that the copious amounts of information are making humans smarter. He says, “The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers” (Is Google Making us Stupid?). Bolter disagrees with this belief. He feels that such easy access to information is causing humans to lose their own beliefs due to the tidal wave of new beliefs that are constantly present on the web. He quotes Kenneth Gergen, who says, “For everything we “know to be true” about ourselves, other voices within respond with doubt and even derision” (23). This concern suggests that the internet is providing so many opinions and views that people are forgetting the beliefs that they held before becoming users. Despite Carr and Bolter’s similar beliefs, they fail to reach a consensus due to this argument.
The final authors to compare are Jodi Dean and Jay David Bolter. There is one clear similarity that can be seen in their texts. They both believe that the internet offers freedom to humans. Dean finds no prejudices in online communities because online, one doesn’t know another’s “sex, race, ethnicity, or ability” (9). She says that one doesn’t “respond to another on the basis of appearance, but on the basis of ideas” (9). Bolter agrees with Dean in very similar terms when he says, online, “race, gender, and even many physical disabilities do not matter: in cyberspace women and minorities can communicate without experiencing the prejudices that they confront in the physical world” (27). However, they, too, depart in their similar beliefs because, while Bolter finds the internet to be a place of much needed freedom with a plethora of possibilities (much due to the invention of web cams), Dean looks at the internet as a money making business with some benefits, but that is by no means flawless.
Overall, Dean and Bolter argue both for and against Carr’s argument. It seems that a consensus cannot be reached based purely upon the ideas of these three writers. Though the web is changing humans, there is no clear cut indication as to whether the changes are for the better or the worse. However, it can certainly be concluded that the internet defines today’s society and is here to stay.
The Influence of the Internet on the Way Its Users Think
There is no doubt that the Internet has shaped the lives of people living in the twenty-first century. It is a resource for needs big and small and is used by people of all different ages and backgrounds. Writers Nicholas Carr, Jodi Dean, and Jay David Bolter have all addressed the Internet and its role in the general public’s lives in their own articles about Google, Internet communities, and the identities of Internet users. While each address different issues, all three writers support the idea that the Internet has changed the lives of its users and the way in which the users think.
In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr makes the point that the Internet provides numerous advantages for its users, like “having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information” (57). As a writer, he says that research that would have taken him days can now be completed in just a few minutes with a few clicks of the mouse. Carr makes sure to point out the benefits of the Internet but he also points out its drawbacks, like that he feels the Internet is “chipping away” his “capacity for concentration and contemplation” (57). Carr refers to Scott Karp, an online blogger, who believes the web has not only changed the way he reads, but, more profoundly, it has also changed the way he thinks. Carr also refers to a developmental psychologist, Maryanne Wolf, who similarly believes the Internet is weakening our capacity for deep reading, as readers now just browse and skim. Readers value efficiency and immediacy in the information they acquire and read, so their ability to interpret text is left unused. Google, a fast-growing company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, is one of the most widely used sources for internet users to acquire such information. “The company has declared that its mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’” (62). Google wants to turn the search engine into a kind of artificial intelligence so that the site knows what users want from their searches and is able to give them just that. The site wants to “solve problems that have never been solved before” (62), and to use technology in new ways. Google even utilizes its users’ searches and the pages they view to gain information about the users themselves and to show them advertisements personalized to their interests. Not only are people making the Internet a large part of their lives, but the Internet is also tuning into the lives and needs of its users. Carr questions whether humans’ intelligence is worsening as computers’ and the Internet’s artificial intelligence is improving. It may seem like a safe assumption to say that people are not reading as many books as they used to and that they have gotten lazier when it comes to reading, but there are still people who enjoy sitting down with a good book or finding and researching their own information in libraries. Carr seems to speak for society as a whole when he claims that his ability to concentrate and contemplate text has changed, which may not be the case for everybody. Carr may seem accurate in his arguments, but until studies and research are done to prove his points, the true effects of this Internet age are not known.
Jodi Dean expresses her view of artificial intelligence in the chapter of Unspun entitled, “Community”. While Carr noted that the Internet is able to pick up on users’ interests, Dean noted that the Internet is also able to link people with similar interests together. People are able to communicate and bond although they are not physically close or similar in other ways simply because they share some interest. Dean mentions chatrooms like Community Memory and The Well that allow strangers to freely circulate information and affiliate on the basis of common interests. Communities like these create connections without judgment because of the animosity of the users behind their computer screens. While all of this interconnection may be beneficial to some people, other people take advantage of the openness and accessibility of the web to deceive, violate, and threaten complete strangers. Chatrooms and other online communities are often disrupted by people with bad intentions, just like the Internet and its convenience are disrupted by the overwhelming number of pornographic sites and images. In the chapter, Dean makes the point that the Internet is great for its ability to bring people together, but is also flawed in the way it allows for deception and the display of inappropriate material. In this way, Dean’s arguments support Carr’s argument that the Internet, although seemingly entirely useful, is sometimes faulty.
In his chapter of Unspun entitled, “Identity”, Jay David Bolter focuses on the Internet’s many uses and its ability to help users develop their own identity. He states, “The World Wide Web…permits us to construct our identities in and through the sites that we create and as well as those that we visit” (17). Bolter notes the Internet’s many uses, like for doing business, viewing television programs, and downloading and listening to music. With the use of homepages and webcams, individuals put their lives on the web as if they were performance artists. Like Dean mentioned, people use chatrooms, or virtual environments, like MUD and MOO to connect. With resources like these, the web allows users to assume multiple voices, like for business, personal use, or scholarly communication. In this respect, people are able to assume voices other than their everyday personas, so that women often assume male identities and men assume female identities. This occurs even though “in these new communications technologies race, gender and even many physical disabilities do not matter: in cyberspace women and minorities can communicate without experiencing the prejudices that they confront in the physical world” (27). People enjoy this freedom from judgment and the ability they have to create an identity on the web different from the identity that exists on the other side of the computer screen. This ties into Dean’s reference to deception on the Internet, but Bolter seems to mention this creation of identity in a more positive light.
All three authors, Carr, Dean and Bolter, note in their writings the many uses and benefits of the Internet. Carr makes the point, that is then supported by Dean and Bolter, that the Internet has changed the lives of all its users and affected the way they think and interact. Whether these users use the search engine, Google, use chatrooms like The Well, or create an identity for themselves using their webcams, the Internet has proven beneficial in most situations. Carr’s article challenges the way Internet users think, while Dean and Bolter’s chapters challenge the way Internet users interconnect and define themselves. Regardless of its use, it is easy to say “never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives-or exerted such a broad influence over our thoughts-as the Internet does today” (Carr 60).
Over the past few decades, the world has undergone a revolution that has transformed both the thoughts and underlying intelligence of the human mind; this revolution is the Internet. The World Wide Web has become an obsession for many people, where the need for this accessible technology overpowers their primitive inclinations towards literature, art, and critical thinking as a whole. The Net offers the potential for social unity, economic success, fulfillment of identity, and free thought. However, despite the positive appeal of this popular utility, the Internet is also a place of individualistic self-servitude and the center of a power struggle between the creator and the reader. Today, the Web has become mobile and handheld, linking individuals to the greatest present database of knowledge. With all of this information at the fingertips of society, the current generation follows a post-modern cyber lifestyle, allowing the Web to link them to civilization when their own minds become incapable of establishing this connection. Within this virtual space of free speech and unknown persons, a myriad of possibilities awaits all those who dare to venture down the “highway” of the World Wide Web.
One of the most appealing attributes of the World Wide Web is the presence of a community. This community exists as an entity void of discrimination based on social class or physical appearance; the Net lets individuals establish their own identity online. As Jodi Dean comments, “Community may well be the most powerful of the aspirations linked to the World Wide Web” (Dean 4). As the name ‘World Wide’ suggests, the Web allows people from all corners of the world within their individual neighborhoods to achieve a higher level of cultural depth. The diversity of the collective online population presents “opportunity to build connections beyond [an individual’s] particular interests” (Dean 8). Likewise, the survival of this interconnected society relies upon the economic and social interests of the whole; they act as a single “community of mind” (Dean 9). The group is considered as one single unit, disregarding the influence that an individual may have in the grand spectrum of the Web’s existence and altering identity. In Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he emphasizes the dependency upon the Web, which inevitably leads to this uselessness of individual characters. Despite the allure of this technological nation, the community presented is falsely ideal through its ultimate isolation of the individual.
To many people, the Web presents itself as a social utility that reveals a utopia of connectivity and legitimate regard for other members within the cyber body. At the emergence of the Web, people sought some sense of this utopia and “Community was thus the promise of meaningful, personal, self-organized interconnection” (Dean 10). The supposedly sentimental feelings create whims of connectivity and assurance. However, despite the aspirations for harmony that this virtual world creates, it presents individuals with a false sense of security. Society as a whole has become fearful of leaving their homes, filled with anxieties about mass murderers. Despite this fear, they disregard the danger of disclosing personal information to other members of this universal online community because of an assumed trust. However, these ideals were quickly shattered by the recognition of deception, and the imperfections of this new Net were revealed (Dean 11). Once this awareness occurred, all hope for an interconnected utopia was disregarded and “participants in computer-mediated communications could only simulate community” (Dean 12). At this point, the Net transformed to a self-fulfilling convenience where individuals focused on themselves and their place in the World Wide Web.
As the Net continued to grow in popularity over the decades, people began to realize its capacity to provide independence and the formation of identity. The Web allows people to exhibit their personality in whatever form they desire, creating any character regardless of their actual gender, race, or social status. Likewise, this technology gave people the opportunity to “become simultaneously both the subject and object of [their] contemporary media” (Bolter 17). Essentially, individuals could create themselves to be authors of a blog page, masterminds or a webpage or online business, or even stars in their own movies or webcam videos. People would search the web for new perspectives and ideas, utilizing Google and other connective sites to create an individual identity through consumerism or social connections. However, despite the artistic outlets available through the Web’s technology and the linking of an identity to a community, this power also results in a confusion of members as they grow tired of one identity and so create another. “The networked self…seems to correspond to a fluctuating and relatively weak notion of community, because in cyberspace identity and community are defined reciprocally” (Bolter 26). In this manner, the Internet becomes detrimental to identity, creating profit for companies but leaving the individual paranoid, confused, and searching for reality in a virtual world.
Despite the negative effects that were becoming frighteningly realistic, society as a whole ignored the strife of identity and mistrust to reap the benefits of financial gain. For the economic marketers targeting this new plethora of consumers, the Web could “gather information about the individual user and therefore tailor its commercial messages much more specifically” (Bolter 19). Carr discusses how Google targets the individual desires of every member surfing the Net to bring them the greatest resources, in turn influencing what they will continue to view and observe online. Jay David Bolter recognized this merging of the economic and private spheres, realizing the effects of the various mediums of expression available to individuals surfing the Web, allowing them to manifest their identities in “an intimate portrait of the author and yet published that portrait to thousands of anonymous readers” (Bolter 21). This manifestation applies to both the financial and the expressive attributes of the Internet; the instinct for creativity of identity becomes more desirable then the probable confusion.
This confusion of identity and false sense of community drives the success of the Internet. For the technology to prevail efficiently, the principles of individuals must remain self-centered and naïve. Google, in its attempts to enhance the mind, seeks to understand the individual reader and make all information accessible to them. However, in their attempts to overshadow critical understanding with ease, they create “a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of self” (Carr 58). Through this new thought process, the creators of web pages help to form the already delicate identities that people are so eager to alter on the Web. Danger occurs when people “come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world,” but in all actuality it is the individual’s “own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence” (Carr 63). At this rate of reliance, it is only inevitable that people will begin to fully depend on the technology. In this virtually-dependent world of cyber space, all critical thought will ultimately be lost to this YouTube generation.
The Internet has been shaping my generation for almost a decade. The ways of communication such as simple telephone calls and letters have turned to text messaging and Facebook wall posts. There is no dispute that the World Wide Web has altered the methods of reading, writing, and even thinking. The question is: could this change be for the worst? The arguments posed by Nicholas Carr, Jodi Dean, and Jay David Bolter discuss the benefits and failures of the Internet. The extensive look that each author provides into the topics of community, identity, and our ability to learn and read cover many points that have a direct impact on our generation. The most common themes addressed by the authors include the changes in thought processes and the need for community and personal acceptance by Internet users. Each argument covers unique and over-lapping aspects of computer use that deserve to be understood.
The readings in Unspun dealt primarily with the problems created by the Internet concerning virtual communities and privacy. Dean argued that many of the earliest forms of cyber communities reduced prejudices among people of different races, sex, or socio-economic status. Through websites such as “The Well”, users could be anyone they wanted. This caused many unexpected problems of perversion and a lack of rules for this completely new medium of interaction. Dean argues, “If we couldn’t see who we were talking to, how could we trust them? How could we be sure who we were talking to? The instability of networked identities and relations was starting to look less like the fulfillment of community than its corruption” (10). Bolter raises similar questions of anonymity in the chapter about identity development. Both arguments stressed the importance of shaping an identity before a user can belong to a community on the web. The prejudices could potentially resurface if the user over- developed their cyber identity. Bolter describes the phenomena of cyber identity and actual identity becoming synonymous. In accordance with Dean’s observations, the media shapes our growth in every way and it becomes impossible to distinguish reality from the cyber world (Bolter 20). Each argument outlines problems that did not exist before the Internet and create a web of further complications.
Both authors also discussed the financial motivation behind many of the websites available and the effect that has had on Internet users. The desire to make money off of the Internet has driven many of the online communities and personal web pages accessible today. Dean discusses the idea that this desire for wealth has created a false community with skewed priorities. With the development of online regulations, advertisements began to play an important role in the sites most commonly visited. Dean explores the restrictions of commercials on the internet, “With its decision that the CDA was too commercially restrictive for the fast lane of the information super-highway, the Court established a space for e-commerce and business use of the Web” (14). This altered the original views of online community, making the Internet a more professional, if not more difficult, place to navigate. Bolter shares Dean’s opinion of online advertising being used to shape the identities of users. Being perhaps the most influential form of media being used in our society, these advertisements affect everyone and form their economic and social aspects of identity. Bolter stressed the fact that the Internet has drastically changed Americans as consumers. The complexities of the World Wide Web aided this change, because website managers could target consumers better, having a more specific idea of their demographic (Bolter 18). The community and identity of consumers is arguably the most influential use of the Internet today, fueling businesses and economies all over the world, in both negative and positive ways.
Carr and Bolter discuss the adaptation that must take place in order to successfully use the Internet. The issues of public versus private identity call for a considerable adjustment. Reminiscent of Samuel Pepys’ journals of the 17th century, the personal homepage or blog makes any private thoughts open to the entire world. Bolter comments, “The personal homepage, whose purpose is nothing other than identity construction, has already emerged as one of the most interesting Web genres” (20). Blogging supplies the open communication between users that many online communities do not provide. The issue still exists, however, that no one user can completely determine the validity of a personal blog entry. Carr and Bolter address the adjustment that must be made to accommodate new media. “The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions,” explains Carr. The human brain will continue to adapt and absorb the current technology that is now available through the internet. Bolter and Carr argue that these adjustments are having a negative effect on the interactions we have with the people around us, in real life and online.
One topic that Carr, Dean, and Bolter agree on is the slow, but definite change in the minds of Internet users. It is inevitable that each new form of media shapes a generation, but the World Wide Web is unique in that it is completely dependent on the people who become addicted to social networking and communication. Learning styles have been forced to adapt to these people, giving new meaning to the standard ways of text book learning. Carr argues that instead of reading books, internet users have become experts at “power browsing” and have lost the major ability to concentrate. In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr quotes Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist. In reference to the media, McLuhan explains that “they supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought” (The Atlantic 57). An important aspect of Carr’s argument that can be easily refuted is the opinion that this change in the thought process is a bad one. The Internet may be distracting users from reading long books or articles, but it has also made millions of news stories, scientific journals, and encyclopedias readily available to the average person. Before the World Wide Web, many Americans did not have access to those types of documents and typically did not put in the effort to find them. Dean and Bolter acknowledge these changes, yet also lean towards the negative impact of the Internet on our ways of thinking and learning.
The arguments discussed by each author highlighted the current issues with Internet use. The way we communicate has been drastically altered as well as the identity formation each user experiences within their online community. In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr explains the toll computers have taken on learning styles and reading comprehension. He sums up the phenomena of the Internet quite well when he states, “Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives- or exerted such a broad influence over our thoughts- as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us” ( The Atlantic 60). With each new addition to the world of cyberspace, a new argument will arise about the positive or negative affects it is having on community, identity, and learning.
In every generation it seems, there is always one invention that has very permanent and lasting change on society, and equally, that invention revolutionizes the way people behave. In this particular case, the way that knowledge is gathered and accrued has been drastically improved as Nicholas Carr noted when he reported that it takes him minutes to find information that used to take him days at the library to find. Yet the development of the world-wide web has also created a new technological culture which has impacted and morphed both the traditional sense of community and identity. The cyber world has produced these changes, and has simultaneously brought up one particularly alarming question phrased by Mr. Carr. As he put it, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Now, at first glance, one might airily respond that the internet has made us all more educated because there is so much more knowledge that can be conjured in mere seconds. However, after inspecting such a question more thoroughly, the evidence supporting the claim that people have lost certain mental skills by way of using the internet is rather astonishingly not only evident, but nearly overwhelming. While this phenomenon is painfully clear, the question now becomes whether people are actually mentally stupider, or if people have just changed the way in which they learn.
First, in accordance with Carr’s argument, it must be stated that there is an extreme amount of truth in his statement that e-browsing has trained the minds of people today who indulge in using the internet to read things less deeply. The example that he provides proving this point is the eye-witness testimony of a blogger named Bruce Friedman who has noticed that he had in his own words, “totally lost the ability to read or absorb a longish article on the web or in print.(Carr, 58)” He however is not alone in discovering this ailment. Additionally, many of Carr’s friends also described the same occurrences happening to themselves after Carr had come to them with his own admission (Carr, 58). What this proves is that for one thing, people are not thinking as deeply as in the past, and consequently, perhaps it can be surmised that very deep and critical thinkers are no longer as abundant as they once were. In that sense, we have become less intelligent due to the fact that many people are not able to think in the manner in which they once did.
Furthermore, in this new age of cyber technology, as is the case with the breakdown of deep thinking and the demise of gaining significant knowledge through long correlated readings, there so too has been a breakdown in the sense of community. In particular, as referenced by Jodi Dean, the e-community has given credence to incredible amounts of deception resulting in a fervent lack of trust and the distortion of community (Dean, 5). This phenomenon is just another way that Google is making us stupid because just as the internet has sapped our ability to synthesize major academic works, so too has the internet ruined the fabric of community which is trust in the people around you. In a very abstract sense, it has made the community as weak as our minds because we are no longer able to readily accept and be faithful enough in people to blindly accept what they say because there have been too many examples of heinous activities such as avatars committing sexual cyberspace crimes just as LambdaMOO did one another, which has led to the mistrust and subsequent breakdown of community (Dean, 11).
Nevertheless, although it may seem that society has been “dumbed down”, and analytically it has been proven so, the truth of the matter is that people today aren’t mentally stupider, they are just a different kind of learner and thinker. People have become much more adept at getting to the root of knowledge more quickly and efficiently (Carr, 62). The onus on literature has been placed on writing brief and to the point material, which people can then decode and use in whatever menial task which they need it for. Therefore, in that respect, communities have become increasingly more efficient and to the point, thereby making us more precise thinkers. In that regard, Google is not making us stupid, instead it is just making us more evolved thinkers with skills that fit the times and the latest demands placed on us. To further that point, Carr mentions the fact that unlike the people of the seventies and eighties, this generation’s tool for entertainment is not the television, but rather the internet (Carr, 60). Meaning that instead of sitting in front of the television for extended periods of time, people are instead sitting in front of computers, and more often than not, they are doing a fair amount of reading. Even if someone is blogging, they are both reading and writing which indicates that people are not necessarily reading less, they are just reading different.
Likewise, in the book Unspun, Jay David Bolter makes note of the reality that identity as a characteristic is beginning to evolve (Bolter, 19). He points out that there is a shifting paradigm of how one’s identity is created. For a long time, people were defined or chose to be defined by their vertical heritage, yet Bolter insinuates that in the internet age, the way that an identity is manufactured is different (Bolter, 22). Today, identity is based on horizontal heritage, as in how we associate with characteristics that are popular today. Associations to political parties are derived not as much from how the past generations from your genealogy voted, but how we as current citizen’s view who has the necessary policies to better govern the world today. One example of this is the extreme shift from left-wing conservatism to a right wing platform buoyed by the policies that point toward drastic change. This example is relevant because it is very similar to the issue of whether people are stupider or just different. In the same way that political thinking has evolved, so too has the way that people acquire knowledge, and how according to Bolter, people have changed the way that they identify themselves.
Henceforth, after examining the ways in which the internet has affected the phonically inclined people of today, I believe that the answer to the question posed by Nicholas Carr in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” cannot be affirmed in either extreme. On one hand, people have admitted that they are no longer able to read in the great lengths and with the understanding that they once did, thereby illustrating the fact that Socrates pointed out when writing was introduced by saying that in effect, the increase in technology dulls the mind (Carr, 63). Yet, on the other hand, this article points out that writing has become much more to the point and summarized, allowing for greater efficiency (Carr, 58). The contrast therefore between zipping along the sea of words on a jet-ski and submerging oneself in the very same sea, as the author put it, is great (Carr, 57). Nonetheless, in today’s world, people are called to mount the jet-ski and glide over the surface instead of mounting scuba gear and flipping overboard. Due to that discrepancy, I feel that Google, and internet readings aren’t making us less intelligent. By the same token, we are a different breed of thinker, and sadly, one that is no longer able to as Bruce Friedman; a professor from Michigan put it, “read War and Peace anymore. (Carr, 58)” While I am not privy to some particular information, it would be interesting to compare the verbal SAT scores from different generations to see if there has truly been a regression in such skills, but at this particular time, I think people have for better or worse, evolved as readers and as thinkers. Nothing more, nothing less.
Change can be quite a scary experience at times. Change can also be beautiful and fulfilling. However, one thing that change is definitely is a staple of the unknown and the particularly unfamiliar. Change is the common thread found throughout three different writings on the worldwide web: Community by Jodi Dean, Identity by Jay David Bolter, and Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr. If all of these writers sat down together to discuss their compositions, it is highly probable that they would have a few things to say to each other.
“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (Carr). In his article, Carr argues that it is very possible that the spread of internet use is slowly decreasing our ability to truly delve into a literary work and digest it fully. The human brain, as Carr reasons along with other sources of insightful opinion such as Friedrich Nietzsche and neuroscience professor James Olds, is extremely ductile throughout the stages of life. Evidence for this can be seen with the idea of drug addiction therapy. Although the patient is somewhat always inflicted with this addiction, the brain now free of drug stimuli or depression has the ability to mold itself to its new drugless functionality. The same effect is that of the human mind forming to a new way of reading, or “cyber reading”, in which information is processed faster and with, most likely, less comprehension. So after all of this, where does Google come into the picture? Basically, Google’s founders’ ultimate goal for the search engine is to find a way to make it work as artificial intelligence, in which to provide specific desired information at the drop of a hat (Carr). So what does that mean for actual human minds? One could only really guess at this point, but an adequate assumption would be that reading would probably not be much of an issue, even going as far to say that it could become extinct.
In Community and Identity, there is a clear argument for the internet as a source of community building potential and identity affirming experiences as opposed to Carr’s argument that the web is facilitating a more shallow existence for its participants. In a way, these articles don’t view the internet as necessarily diminishing learning potential but perhaps enhancing it, if handled properly. In Community, Dean writes, “It enabled connections that transcended the very limits of the body: on-line, one didn’t know another’s sex, race, ethnicity, or ability. One didn’t respond to another on the basis of appearance, but on the basis of ideas; the virtual community was a community of mind.” Perhaps newly established internet communities can function as a truly enriching fellowship where active parties can explore their own personal identities and relate them to others. Bolter in Identity takes things a step further and suggests that how people represent themselves on-line (usually through homepages and/or webcams) can be used as a clue to study their own identities and the subsequent identities they “create” for themselves in cyber-reality. Mirroring Dean, Bolter also comments that, “in these new communications technologies race, gender, and even many physical disabilities do not matter: in cyberspace women and minorities can communicate without experiencing the prejudices that they confront in the physical world.” In this way, the internet gives people whose identities in the actual world of reality would be those that are not taken completely seriously a chance to develop the ideas and opinions of those identities more fully and empower them to grow and flourish. In general, both Community and Identity suggest an avenue by which people can develop strong and sometimes even intellectual communities and nurture their own perception of their identities. This is a different idea than is described in Carr’s article.
Of course, there is a line to be crossed, a boundary between decent and indecent, between using the internet as a tool and surrendering our lives to it. However, do we ever truly know where that line is? Is the point of no return when we all so become cyborg versions of our previous selves as Google’s artificial intelligence takes over? Even though becoming robots is an obviously huge issue, the line of human decency is also being crossed not only in real, physical life but also in virtual reality. Dean describes a disturbing occurrence in an online “house” where users interact called LambdaMOO. In the living room of this virtual house, a clown-like character by the name of Mr. Bungle used a voodoo doll to force sexual activity and violation on others. This incident dented the sense of community once felt by that online server. Mr. Bungles was virtual killed off the online server as punishment, but this occurrence demonstrated the often shallow and dangerous internet that Carr describes. In his article Carr writes, “It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized…The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.” The farther and farther technological advances take us, the more and more it appears that the human brain is seen as something inferior, something that can be improved upon, just like a piece of machinery. As the perceived value of human decency and also of human intelligence wanes in the eyes of the public, the greater the influence of superficial learning, investigation, and basic human respect.
When does the line between reality and pretend become fuzzy? Do we really know the person on the other end of the computer? Dean explains another chilling incident that occurred on the internet site CompuServe in Community. CompuServe was an email and conferencing provider (Dean). On this site, a completely healthy man in New York by the name of Alex posed as a woman named Joan who had been in a car accident which caused her to become disabled and deformed. Acting as “Joan”, Alex manipulated the women on the site by having deep conversations with them and even advocating them to engage in sexual relations with “her”. Once the scheme was uncovered, many of the manipulated women as well as others were extremely offended and felt a sense of betrayal (Dean). Dean writes, “Many of us online believe that we’re a utopian community of the future, and Alex’s experiment proved to us all that technology is no shield against deceit.” Besides just the deception that others inflict on the web, individuals can also damage their own sense of self. In Identity Bolter describes online “novels” or sites where many different participants embody a character and help to develop their story. This seems like a great tool by which to lose one’s own identity and cross the thin line between their true physical realities and the characters they form for themselves. Reading, as stated by Carr, is also taking on a different meaning through the worldwide web. It too, is becoming blurred.
Human decency and surmised intellectual power is diminishing, as is people’s ability to distinguish between the real and make-believe. Although some aspects of the internet continue to be productive and safe avenues of exploration, other forces are also at work to turn the human into the subhuman; from deeply thinking individuals to shallow robots. In response to Carr’s question, “Is Google making us stupid?”, well maybe not stupid, but something besides ourselves whether that transition be for the better or for the worse. It can either turn one into an unthinking robot or an enhanced human being. It is for the individual person to decide just how the internet will affect them.
Reading the different media associated with this paper set me thinking. The article by Nicholas Carr even had me doubting my own eyes; was I even reading the article or simply skimming for the relevant information? I have no idea. But I do know that they all brought up interesting points, community being one of them. Having read a lot about community in my freshman reading, I like to think I’m an expert on different types of community. But I wouldn’t have dreamt of relating community to the Internet.
According to Jodi Dean, the Internet community is a term relating to relationships formed over the Internet and carried out through long conversations – I presume using chat rooms but could also be formed over Facebook or the equivalent. How exactly can one form a relationship over the Internet? I understand how one can keep a relationship alive through messages and comments, but forming an entirely new relationship seems impossible. How can you know what someone is really like through a chat, without seeing them face-to-face?
Which leads to my next point, from Carr’s article. He mentions that the language we use over the Internet is different to the language of conversation or written text you see in books. If this is so, then how can anyone hold an intellectual conversation over instant messaging, when all the messages would be in abbreviated blurbs and void of any significant meaning? Significant meaning to me is a discussion involving topics of importance to the people involved, their beliefs and opinions. I can assure you meaningful conversation does not take place in many of these settings, but I can’t speak for all the chat rooms out there. I personally don’t think you can really get to know someone all that well through a chat room, because it’s impossible to judge a person’s character through a key board and screen, “plenty of human contact, but no humanity” (Clifford Stoll 1995:43).
Chat rooms in general I find a little questionable. Jodi Dean remarks on the growth of the chat room phenomenon, but the examples she used I think speak for themselves. The creepy guys that take over the rooms and make everyone feel uncomfortable, and the ones that use fake names to impersonate people are the types that make chat rooms totally unwelcome places. I personally tried using chat rooms years ago as a means of communicating with my friends, and not only were they complex but the vulgarity used in them made me quit immediately.
After reading Carr’s article, I was immediately paranoid. The computer that I’m typing this essay on is influencing the way I read, think and speak. Why is there not more research on this? But if there was such research, would I read it in a scientific article, or on a website? How much does this Internet lingo hinder my brains way of thinking? I rather liked the anecdote by a writer who said that since research is now so simple over the Internet, he no longer needs to devote hours to scouring through complex texts when he can use a search engine and find the information in minutes. How often have I used search engines on the library computers instead of reaching for a book? My teachers insisted we used all the data we had at our fingertips, which I literally thought would be my keyboard. Little did I know my ability to read vast paragraphs would be damaged.
Google in itself makes me paranoid. The fact that the creators are trying to turn it into artificial intelligence terrifies me. Why Google needs to be advanced anymore is beyond me, when I can Google myself and get thousands of results (none of me, thankfully, but many other “Jenna Allen” candidates pop up), pertain an email address through Google, and even Google map an address. In the Google mindset, it is believed that the more information we have access to, and the faster we can get this information, the more productive thinkers we become. Which, in effect, is exactly the opposite of what Carr is trying to argue. Interesting.
Jay D. Bolter begins by discussing identity as it relates to the Internet. What is an Internet identity? Well with other media, such as television, our identity is the way we respond to the what’s in front of us. With the Internet, supposedly our identity is formed by the way we visit and interact with sites. We use the media around us to help identify who we are. I guess this would relate directly to Facebook in the sense that the page you create has pictures of you, your interests and friends and hobbies and favorite music. It is a little introduction to the person you are, or would like to be. Because you can quite easily display yourself in any context that you would like, effectively changing the way people see you.
So is there are link between Bolter’s theory of identity and Carr’s theory of stupidity? Perhaps. My generation are using sites like Facebook more and more, to the point were it could be classified as a sort of addiction. Rarely do these users write in long, thoughtful prose, instead cutting down their writing to the bare bones. This ‘bare bones’ writing style is in fact what Carr is referring to, the inability to write anymore.
I like Carr’s article the most, because it brings up a series of different yet valid point that all set me thinking; what if instead of my reading ability progressing, it’s actually declining? If Google does produce artificial intelligence that can think as well or better than a human, what does that mean for us humans? What if we already have declined so much in intelligence that we ourselves are no better than an unfeeling robot? If the world is becoming like I-Robot, I fear for us all. Put too much trust in the machines, and your humanity slowly leaks away. Here’s to putting down the computer, and picking up a big intricately written book.
In today’s society, where super-computers reign and it seems as if everything can be solved with the click of a mouse, the acts of reading and writing seem to be relics of the past. Ask a high school senior what the last book she read was (not counting school books) and she may look at you as if you just asked her to write a ten page paper in Mandarin. So the question is, who takes the blame for the apparent decline in reading for our generation? Although this question seems simple enough, the answer is far more complicated than you would imagine because of one word which has managed to transform a generation: the Internet.
The Internet is a valuable tool that is utilized by everyone from elementary school students to senior citizens; in this way, it can be seen as a link between generations, a sort of “community” that connects people in ways that were previously unimaginable. It can also be argued that the Internet promotes reading, as millions of people read blogs, news articles, and other online posts daily. Although this seems to be a positive attribute of the Web, this supposed online “reading” has gradually decreased both the depth and perception of the human brain as stated in Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr’s article focuses on this negative aspect of the Internet and its effect on human thinking and interpretation skills. In his article, Carr states that: “Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged” (58). He blames this fact on the Internet and the style of reading and writing that it promotes. The Web is so popular because of its convenience; a person can scan the headlines of a webpage in a matter of two minutes and know what is going on in the world, or at least know a brief synopsis of what’s going on. Reading the newspaper takes far too much time to fit into the busy schedules of today’s working class citizens. So, in a sense, we are trading in our ability to think and read deeply for the convenience of saving ten minutes of our precious time. Carr is skeptical of this idea and is wary of the human brain’s progression towards artificiality.
Although Carr seems to have a pessimistic outlook on the Web, there are others who manage to see the Internet in a more positive light. In Unspun, author Jodi Dean concentrates on the Internet as a center of community, a place in which people of different ethnicities, races, genders, and backgrounds can come together without the burden of their differences getting in the way. Dean supports this openness of the Web in his article in Unspun: “Rheingold uses the term ‘public,’ implying that a virtual community has a kind of openness and accessibility that distinguishes it from more private forms of affiliation such as those in the family and workplace” (6). This quote shows how the Internet can provide an unbiased community because its members cannot see each other; therefore, they cannot know whether or not another person in the group is male or female, black or white, handicapped or not. However, there are two sides to every argument, and this brings about the question of truth online. “If we couldn’t see who we were talking to, how could we trust them? How could we be sure who we were talking to?” (Dean 10) This point is especially relevant today, when sexual predators online are revealed every day. It can be seen that Dean’s view of the Internet is quite different from the view of Carr, although there is one major similarity which I will address later on.
Jay David Bolter, like Dean, has a more positive opinion of the Web in his article “Identity” in Unspun. Bolter argues that the Internet allows us “to construct our identities in and through the sites that we create as well as those that we visit” (17). Essentially, we can be whoever we want to be while on the Web. This fact can be seen in two lights, however, and Bolter mentions both in his article. The positive light: we have the freedom and ability to recreate ourselves online and be in a community that accepts us because it cannot see our physical appearance. This can be extremely liberating for handicapped individuals or others who are often teased because of their disabilities or appearances in the physical world. The virtual world becomes like a safe haven for them, a world in which they are not judged for what is on the outside. The negative light: our identity cannot be truly shown in a world where half the people are being untruthful about their own identities. If we can constantly change things about ourselves on the Web, then it is not a true community made up of true identities. Although it seems that we can become someone new while online, it really is impossible to completely separate the physical world from the virtual world. As stated in Bolter’s article: “Cyberspace simply becomes another arena for the complex social negotiations of our culture. Cultural theorists argue that we can never truly erase markers such as race and gender because they constitute our identity” (28). No matter how hard we try to make ourselves feel “at home” in online communities, it will still be a lie because you can never really know someone else on the Internet.
After reviewing all three articles, it seems as if each one is entirely different from the next. Carr concentrated more on the intellectual aspect of the Internet, Dean centered in on the social perspective, and Bolter dealt with the individual side of the Web. Although their focuses were on different areas of the online world, one major theme permeated through all three articles: the theme of isolation caused by the Internet. This is a surprising theme, at least to me, because at first glance it seems as if the Web is place of connection and unity, a tool that is capable of bringing together people from all around the globe, of all different ages and races. However, after reading these three articles, it is apparent that our society is slowly isolating ourselves from the real, physical world through the use of excessive technology: mainly, the Internet.
Carr’s argument shows how humans are isolating themselves from the physical world of books and newspapers because of time. There isn’t enough time in the day to actually sit down and focus on reading a book or articles in a newspaper; instead, we feel the need to condense these things into five minute intervals of scanning a news page or blog online. This may seem like a harmless, time-saving tool at first, but after weeks of “scanning” as a daily routine, it becomes a habit and slowly starts to isolate our minds from the intellectual world. Concentration becomes a burden, actually reading a book becomes nearly impossible—we slowly begin to lose some of the few characteristics that make us human and separate us from the super-computers.
Similarly, Dean’s article brings up this point of isolation from society. This is probably the most surprising of all, considering his article is titled “Community.” However, a philosopher Slavoj Zizek states that: “The use of computers as a tool ‘to rebuild community results in the building of a community inside the machine, reducing individuals to isolated monads, each of them alone’” (Dean 5). Although the Web is supposed to be a connective tool, it can backfire and end up isolating us from others in both the real world and the virtual world. I feel as though an online community is an oxymoron, mainly because you really don’t know the people around you. When I think of a community, I think of my neighborhood at home—how everyone will help you out if you need it: lend you some sugar, take in your mail while you are on vacation, or water your plants if you’re sick. Would you really trust someone you met on the Internet in the same way? This point leads right into Bolter’s article “Identity.” If you can constantly change who you are online, you become a fleeting identity and are basically alone. People can’t recognize your real identity in the virtual world or your virtual identity in the real world.
In conclusion, we must be careful as to how much we rely on the Internet as a source of connectivity, because in the end, it may end up isolating us from civilization completely. A tool with so much influence in our society must be viewed with caution so that it doesn’t overtake our world and make us lose all of them remarkable things that characterize our humanity.
Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” argues that the revolution of the internet changes the human thought process, making people dependent on instant gratification and thus less capable of drawing conclusions for themselves. Jodi Dean and Jay Davis Bolter both make valid points in Unspun to generalize the effect of technology and, specifically the internet, on people. Their works, Community and Identity, respectively, provide information about the internet to support Carr’s stance. Though Dean, Bolter and Carr make separate arguments in their works, there are three common themes: Influence of the media, redefinition of the self and liberation from the physical. These themes all combine to further support Carr’s fear: the rise of computers and their eventual transcendence of humans.
The Internet has been widely used as a tool for marketing. Advertisements and pop-ups fill pages to promote products and shape consumers. Carr notes that a person’s web history can be tracked so as to help advertisers appeal to that individual’s interests. Bolter states that, “web consumers begin to take on identities that follow them through their journeys in cyberspace” (20). If multiple web pages have similarities in content, advertisers will know what products to show to target customers. The marketing industry can begin to shape consumers as they want them. Dean refers to the term, “cookie” with respect to computers. Fooling people with their warm and friendly title, cookies plant information in computer files, tracking site history and promoting e-commerce. Carr connects advertisements to his theme by saying that they appear all over in television, newspapers and magazines. As people become less patient readers, advertisements take the place of words as stories become shorter.
Bolter’s comment on identity is the second point shared by the authors. With changes in the internet and technology, people, too, begin to change their own identities. One of Carr’s examples for his argument is the change in reading styles. People no longer sit and read books, pages, uninterrupted. They would much rather prefer clicking through a few links to find the information they need instantly. As far as identity, this shows that people adapt to new technologies, rather than integrate them into their lives. Rarely do people open dictionaries before googling words. Google is not even a verb, yet when used as such most people would understand the meaning because they adapt. Dean emphasizes that people skew their image when trying to communicate with strangers virtually. They lie about their true identities and take on false ones to meet people and fulfill a sense of belonging. If people cannot identify themselves as individuals and have their own thoughts then what will differentiate people from other people, or, ultimately, as feared by Carr, people from machines.
Finally all three writers say that the internet liberates people from the physical, allowing them to transcend their bodies. People can be whoever they want to be in a virtual world. No one knows anyone else’s true age, race, gender, disability or identity altogether. Dean refers to the virtual community as a “community of mind.” Not only is identity changing through the use of technology and the internet, but people can choose to manipulate it in order to know others. There are no physical boundaries that, as in real life, may inhibit a person. Dean discusses how people feel the need to belong and are in search of communities. These communities, however, cannot truly exist because they are not comprised of people with similar interests. When online, people take on different personas in order to make connections with others. Bolter explains the concept of how creating a homepage can put a person on the same level as someone far more prominent, well-known or well-off. Carr references “intellectual technologies” as those which exceed the physical and are for our minds. The ability for one to feel outside of their body allows their mind to flow through the network of information on the web. In the virtual world, no one is distinguished by physical or real life characteristics. As with changing identity, the feeling of a separated body and mind could minimize differences between humans and computers.
A topic that both Bolter and Carr discuss in great detail is the concept of artificial intelligence (AI). Carr draws the conclusion that AI is the future of technology; that the final goal of all recent advancements is to create a more systematic and efficient way of life. He fears the desire to replace the human mind with that of a computer. People will no longer be asked to think critically or exercise their own brains. Bolter discusses the comparison of the human mind to a program running on the brain, which could eventually be replaced by actual software running on machines. As of now, people use the internet as a social tool as well as an informational crutch. People are gaining dependence on the web to provide information, though they still can function on their own. There is, however, the possibility in the future that machines will surpass humans. Carr promotes the idea of reading printed pages and drawing conclusions individually to keep our minds sharp, rather than being given answers by a machine. If cognitive skills are not practiced they will become challenging, inconvenient or frustrating and eventually, nonexistent with the rise of machines.
Both Dean and Bolter’s works provide arguments that support Carr’s original point: the current prominence of the Internet reduces human cognitive skills as they become dependent on the web for information and instant gratification. Carr fears the eventual replacement of the mind by artificial intelligence and of humans by computers. Media influence, changing identity and liberation from physical factors, as discussed by the three authors, all provide reason to believe that this fate is plausible. With more marketing ads online, words become fewer and people’s attention spans for reading shorten. Internet users adjust their own identities to what the media portrays as an ideal consumer and they modify themselves with technological advancements. People also extend themselves to outside the parameters of their bodies, becoming a mind among the web. People are adapting to technology and becoming less differentiable from each other. Cognitive skills and critical thinking are declining with the rise of computers and without any efforts for change Carr’s fear could very well become reality.
“To go where no man has gone before” was the mission statement of the Starship Enterprise in the widely popular science fiction television series Star Trek. The idea has been transcendent throughout human culture from forging new paths through foreign lands, to landing on the moon, and now to the invention and exploration of manmade, digital landscapes. The Internet has become a staple in our high speed, high tech world appearing now in many personal electronics apart from the pc. However, the new shift in human culture is causing much despair among philosophers trying to predict the possible outcomes of such a dramatic alteration. Some implications these philosophers are warning against include societal degradation with spoofed identities, pornography and uncensored expletives, a reconfiguration of the brain that could replace book reading with power browsing, and some even to the extreme of loss of identity. Even with all of these warnings though, each of these thinkers has something uniquely positive to say about the Web and its rapidly expanding influence.
Nicholas Carr, a writer/philosopher, recently wrote an article for The Atlantic where he expressed his opinions on the dawning digital age. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think,” he said in light of his newly developed reading habits. He claims that no longer does he have the patience to sit and read a full article, let alone a book. He says his brain now expects information to come in a Web-like format that is quick and concise. Furthering this claim, he suggests that by participating in this style of reading, he has lost his capacity for deep thinking. “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” There are obvious benefits to easily accessible information. Research time needed has rapidly decreased with text and Google searches, all information is in one place not spread over volumes of books, and it’s portable. In addition, the internet has not only increased the speed of information transactions, it has exponentially expanded the volume of that information as well. Despite its usefulness, Carr still worries about his and the general human loss of deep, critical thinking as a result of this information revolution. As deduced from his reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey the real concern is that humankind will gradually become more robotic in their thought, as computers with artificial intelligence are developed to closer resemble humans. If this happened and the human capacity for deep thought was indeed lost, what would prevent the computers from fully replacing humans?
Luckily, Jodi Dean, coauthor of the book Unspun has a positive retort. Throughout her research of Web-based communities, she has developed an opinion that suggests that the involved web users are not becoming automatons, in fact quite the opposite. She says that Web-based community is “infused with feeling, emotion, and affect,” and in fact could not function was that not the case. In her chapter, she cites that communities are aggregate and not merely a sum of their parts, but that the people actually “feel an obligation to something beyond themselves.” A web community she says can function normally without any one of its members, though some members are more important to the community than others and could thus have a greater impact upon their exit. Another important benefit to these communities was the open exchange of ideas with people of similar attributes as opposed to previous communities where the sole association may have been geographic. Dean has her own concerns about the internet, though. The early internet was populated not with groups for open discussion or recipe exchange as it promised, but with pornography and delinquency. According to her, these pose potential hazards as it could easily degrade the societal standards and place children at risk of exposure. Since then however, the Internet largely has become the things that it once promised housing political groups of all sorts, as many recipes as one can imagine, and endless banks of information. And while pornography and delinquency still run rampant, the problems are much less noticeable because they can be easily blocked or avoided for those not wishing to experience them.
Another author of Unspun, Jay David Bolter disagrees. Dean’s sense of emotional web communities can be easily unraveled by the incidents with spoofed identities. He views the benefits of the internet to be largely based in commerce. Advertisements cover the new face of the Web and thanks to cookies and other tracking applications, they can be specifically targeted at consumers likelier to buy their products. This system contributes to the safety concern that Dean expressed by targeting pornography towards porn viewers only. Bolter seems to hold mixed feelings about certain things though. With the advent of the webcam and sites like Youtube, instant fame is made possible by the potential millions of viewers, however, especially webcams seem to cheapen real identity by being on display constantly in some cases. Identity is also fading with the idea that one can never know who is on the other side of cyberspace. He hypothesizes that this is just a new brand of identity where people have multiple, malleable self representations all over the internet. He also supports Carr’s point that artificial intelligence is very like the human mind and has been likened to such since its invention in the 1940’s. But to contradict Carr, he says that the source of media helps to define our identities, but does not fully infiltrate them.
Perhaps there is no knowing what the impact of computers will be on the human race. Carr does make a hefty argument however that when writing was invented and Socrates said it would take away free thought and memory, he was right. And when people spoke out against the printing press saying people would become intellectually lazy constantly having books on hand, they were correct. He also however, concedes that writing and the printing press has unseen benefits that far outweighed their criticisms. He thus makes room for the same concession with respect to “power browsing” as having unforeseen benefits that current defenders of the printed word cannot yet know. One thing can be known and that is the effects that the internet have already had. The style of reading is changing, identities will be spoofed, and pornography is as rampant as ever. What cannot be known, are the long term effects of this on humankind. Will nearly infinite access to information and communication at all times hyper-develop human society or will it rob us of our power to think critically? Will computers and humans merge and become automatons or cyborgs? Will some unseen collective consciousness or super-being arise from the implantation of technology into the human mind? Clearly there will be downfalls, the gamble in the situation is what the potential benefits are and whether they will outweigh the costs. Unfortunately though, time is necessary to determine any of these things and all that can be done is wait.
Both the essay “Identity” and the essay “Community” share the common theme of redefining social interaction through the use of the World Wide Web. In “Identity”, the previous generation’s cultural identity is turned on its’ ear through use of the World Wide Web. Where once people could define themselves through television shows and radio programs now can have a more hands on approach by designing their own personal website or hosting a webcam. “Community” also brings to light how much the World Wide Web has changed the way people interact. Originally, a community was a group of people who lived near each other or were part of the same organization. Now the World Wide Web allows “relationships between those who are not already linked by tradition, proximity, profession, or affiliation” (Dean, 2000). In summation, the two essays don’t necessarily say that the classic idea of community and identity are dead, but they have definitely been changed and broadened by the World Wide Web.
Another key point that both “Identity” and “Community” share is the idea of separating the physical body from the ideas it presents. In everyday life, physical beauty matters a lot more than it should. The idea implied in both essays is that for once, ideas are not inhibited by the looks of the people expounding them. Communities that blossomed on the World Wide Web “transcended the very limits of the body…one didn’t respond to anther on the basis of appearance, but the basis of ideas.” (Dean, 2000) In the essay on Identity, MUDs are discussed at length. While very dorky, MUDs allowed people to express themselves while not being chained to their physical appearance. In these “Multi User Dungeons” people could become whatever character they liked, real or imaginary, to interact however they saw fit. It is clear that in both essays, the authors feel that the World Wide Web allowed people to express themselves freely like never before.
“Identity” and “Community” also briefly touch upon the dark sides of the World Wide Web. While the World Wide Web is a brilliant new tool, it isn’t a utopia and both essays talk a little bit about the lying, hacking and pornography included in the cyber world. In “Community” it is stated that the World Wide Web is home to “every kind of pornography imaginable…(and) teenagers exchanging banalities and expletives.” (Dean, 2000) While separating appearance from ideas is clearly a positive thing, both essays touch upon the unwanted by product of this, deception. When no one knows your true identity, it’s very easy to lie about who you are. In “Identity”, Bolter states it is a widely known fact that in “MUD or chat room, no one can verify a participant’s age or gender.” (Bolter, 2000) While sometimes this sense of deception is part of the fun, sometimes it can also go very, very wrong. An example of deception not being part of the fun games would be, “interactions with a caring woman, disfigured and disabled following a car crash, turned about to be exchanges with an able bodied man.” (Rheingold 1993:165)
Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, seems to have very little connection on the surface to the two articles previously discussed from Unspun. They don’t cover the same topics and the similarity really isn’t very overt. Although 8+ years seperates these two articles, there is a similar theme in both. Both essays are written with wonder and slight fear of the technology to come. In “Identity” and “Community” topics are presented that at the time are cutting edge; webcams, chat rooms, MUDs, homepages. Comparisons are made, and while not explicitly state, the authors wonder if these things are changing our traditional sense of community and identity. Fast forward 8 years, and all of things covered in these two articles are either commonplace or even obsolete to our current generation of internet users. Now there is a whole new field of concerns in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Now that people are no longer amazed by the idea of an internet community, concerns are now being raised about the internet destroying our ability to concentrate and the idea of one day creating a super AI computer. The conclusion that can be drawn is that there will always be something down the road that is new enough and different enough to merit an essay being written about it.
The two essays featured in Unspun differ from each other in the way they are set up. The essay on “Community” is organized a bit like a historical piece; it makes sense having it as the first essay in the book. The essay outlines the history of communities on the World Wide Web from the very first primal bulletin board systems in the 70s and 80s to the more advanced “third phase” of communities in the 1990s. In “Identity”, the topics are laid out just as they are, topics relating to identity. The essay covers webcams, homepages, and MUDs as ways of defining one’s identity on the internet.
The essay “Community” seems a lot more jaded than the essay “Identity”. In some parts of “Community” there is overwhelming positivity about the idea of community on the internet, but other parts it becomes more pessimistic. “Computers have become tools of the people, but the people aren’t using them to transform society in progressive directions” (Dean, 2000). This statement reads much like Thomas Hobbes wrote it in the view that when people are left to their own devices, things will inevitably all go to hell. “Identity” on the other hands sees the World Wide Web in a more optimistic light. They see it as a wonderful place where people can express themselves through webcams or homepages; a place where people can experiment with different writing styles and personalities. I think if Jodi Dean could make a rebuttal to Jay David Bolter’s John Locke type view of the internet she would have a few things to say. She would say yes, some people use webcams and homepages to express themselves, but many more use them to post pornography or degrading insults. She would say that all of those different writing styles and personalities only lead to people deceiving others about their true identities and manipulating them.
“As we come to rely on the computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence” (Carr), states Nicholas Carr at the conclusion of his article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?". A powerful statement, Carr’s article develops on an idea that has been evolving for several years, in sync with the rapid expansion of the Internet- mainly, upon the issue that asks if humans are becoming increasingly more dependant on the Internet, as it so readily and easily provides information. Although Carr’s article focuses on the negative influences of the Internet on society, there have been other authors who feel that the Internet has had majorly beneficial effects. In "Unspun: Key Concepts for Understanding the World Wide Web", several authors come together to comment on how the Internet is affecting society in a more positive way. Jodi Dean elaborates on the sense of community that can be found on the Internet, as Jay David Bolter touches upon the feeling of identity that one can achieve from the Internet. Although they have differing opinions on the subject, all three authors make extremely valid points.
Dean’s opinion on the Internet is that it fosters a sense of community unlike anything previously experienced. She claims that “computers were celebrated for the ability to facilitate grassroots connection, for their capacity to revitalize connections between people and give them new opportunities to share, debate, and engage” (Dean). On the other hand, Carr’s article makes the claim that it is becoming increasingly more impossible for those who use the Internet to foster these connections, as their functions to ‘share, debate, and engage’ are deteriorating. Carr writes, “our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged” (Carr). Similarly, Dean does agree somewhat with some of Carr’s statements on the impersonal nature of the Internet when she writes “the warmth may not be there. The continuity of attachment may be lacking. Self-interest may usually override a feeling of community”, however she concludes her findings with the idea that “the sense of being a part of something larger does accompany community on the Web” (Dean), therefore saying that the sense of community established on the Internet could possibly be more beneficial, which contradicts statements Carr makes in his article concerning the negative impact of the Internet.
In accordance with Dean’s arguments, Bolter makes statements about personal identity on the Internet that also contradict Carr’s opinions as presented in his article. Bolter believes that the Internet is ultimately an extension of the identities we posses as individuals in real life: “electronic technologies of communication cannot ultimately deny our embodied identities, Instead, our culture is using these technologies to examine the meaning of embodiment-to explore how we choose to represent our embodied identities to others and ourselves” (Bolter). Although Bolter makes a valid point, the majority of Carr’s article is makes several points on the idea that the Internet is turning society into constant plugged-in robots with a dependance on technology, especially the Web. Carr himself claims that he can no longer remain focused on reading, saying “my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages” (Carr). This should raise some concerns about the negative effects of the Internet, as Carr is clearly an educated and well-read individual.
However, it is important to note the large difference between the publishing dates of each work and how this could affect each author’s opinion on the subject of the Internet. "Unspun" was published in 2000, when the Internet was popular but nowhere near the advanced level it is today, Carr’s article was published eight years later in 2008. At the alarming rate the Internet expands, changes have undoubtedly been made that would greatly impact each argument if it was written in another time. For example, Dean and Bolter both believe that the Internet fosters a sense of community and identity, through interaction with other people on the Web. However, it has become more apparent (eight years in the future) that there are many dangerous people- such as predators, scammers, and liars- on the Internet, and one must be as safe as possible when interacting with others.
Community, by definition, is “a unified body of individuals”(Merriam Webster, 2007). Mass amounts of people have connected with others, forming huge cyber reality communities with people who otherwise would not have been connected. The question becomes how realistic these communities are able to become. In a real world community, people connect with one another based on their location and what they have in common because of this location. People get to know their neighbors and share similar worries and concerns about things inside of their community. People often make connections with others based on similar interests inside of this community. Cyber communities are also very similar to this. People are able to connect based on thoughts and ideas. People who are thousands of miles away from each other are able to share opinions on thoughts on commonalities they have. The restriction of distance is no longer there.
However, there are certain things that are missing in a cyber community, and ultimately the biggest thing is feeling. In cyber communities it is difficult to get a true emotional connection to these people that you are, many times, unable to see or talk to in person. For one thing, according to Nicholas Carr in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid, people are rarely immersing themselves into online sources of information. People are more likely to skim the page, get what they need to find, and be done with reading the web page. This form of researching is very similar to how people are connecting to these cyber communities. Without the comfort of being around people physically, it could be difficult to truly connect and get emotionally involved with the community in cyber space. People may join a community, share some thoughts, find what they need to find from other people in the cyber community, and leave whenever they want to. The fact that people can leave whenever they want to is very different from real communities, where you are physically at tied down to wherever your home may be. You are physically connected with this community, and whether you like it or not, it is much harder to get away from these people than it is to get away from the cyber community. The physical component is missing in cyber reality, and that is why there is such a difference. In the “Google” article Maryanne Wolf, a psychologist, states “We are not only what we read, we are how we read.” This also goes for how we form communities. It is not who we form the communal bond with, but it is how. People who only “skim the surface” of these communities, take what they need, and leave are not only hurting the community by not giving back but also hurting themselves by not connecting emotionally
with these people. Communities must make connection much deeper than what is found on the surface to become successful.
The web is also making a difference in how people identify with themselves and how they identify with others. The web makes it faster, much more efficient to share a blog or to create an autobiographical site and share it with others, therefore sharing your identity and posting it online. The fast past cyber world has thousands of ways to post your personal information and find information on other people. The web is making a difference on how you view yourself and others. Ultimately the web is making it much easier to find and connect with others. It is easier to do research on people and things. It saves time so people are able to do things more efficiently and learn numerous things at once. This does save time but it effects how people think about themselves. People are no longer thinking critically of who they are as people and how to best identify themselves. In a physical community, people are identified as a certain race, a certain hair color, a certain gender, and so on. When using the web, one does not need to enclose this sort of information if they don’t want to. People are able to identify with ideas and thoughts, which sounds like a good idea. For example, in the pre web world it was necessary to physically write what you wanted to share with others. This took time and effort. Using the web you are able to share who you are with people in minimal time and effort. This advantage is huge in today’s society which lives at such a fast pace in the physical world. It is almost necessary to get involved somehow in the World Wide Web because everyone else is.
However, our cyber space identities are used very often by companies trying to market their products. People are constantly being barraged with advertisements that are able to track what they do and where they go. Identities essentially are being created for them based on what sites they visit and what they do there. Our identities are being used to sell products and find other customers to sell to. Because of the constant “stalking” of these marketers, we are given less time to create our own identity using the web. Because of this people are unable to attempt to connect with others to try to join and fully appreciate a cyber community without the fear of marketers. The superficial identity takes over, and people are just pawns of the marketing world on the web.
Not only is this the case but people are not thinking as critically as who they are as people. By using the web to create and share their identity people may attract people they did not intend to. They may be sharing information with people they do not want to share with. The connections may become superficial, making the identities involved superficial as well. Thinking uncritically of connections you make and how you make them can make the brain think differently about why you make connections with people. This can ultimately effect the connections you make in the physical world, as well as the cyber world.
As long as people are identifying with others and creating a community, people will always have to rely on trust. It is necessary to trust the people in the community, because without it, you are unable to make clear connections with anyone. Trusting in a physical world can be tricky. People lie, cheat, and steal in the physical world. People can abuse your trust. However, in the cyber world, it can be even more difficult to catch these liars. As Dean describes, Joan, a member of CompuServe, was not only not a Joan, but a man named Alex. The people that befriended Joan felt very hurt and very betrayed (Unspun, page 11). In a cyber community, when we look at someone’s web page or talk to them via the internet, we trust that they are telling us the truth. These people could very well be lying to us. This abuse of trust can hurt us physically, even if it is in the cyber world. When joining a cyber community people should feel confident and safe speaking with others and sharing ideas and thoughts with the other members of the community, but it can be difficult.
The idea of a cyber community is very idealistic. If it worked, it would be great. People being honest with who they are and sharing ideas with others who have similar interests. It could connect vast numbers of people, ignoring any physical boundaries that were between them. People could make real connections with others. It essentially could help people find their true identity, as well as their cyber identity. The web may be on the way to something like this happening, but if it continues to move at such a fast pace then it may be near impossible. It is sad to say this but people today should be skeptical of who they meet on the web. They should be careful of the information they put out onto the web. They do not know who will be able to gain access to their information. People should be careful of how they make a connection with people on the web, because it can greatly affect how they interact and make connections in the real world.
In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Nicholas Carr focuses on the Net and the impact it is having on not only on our thoughts, but also on how we think about ideas and why we think about them. It would seem that a constant influx of information that compels us to learn about everything and anything would help to educate and propel us towards a new era of enlightenment. However, this constant bombardment of information does the exact opposite. With so much information at the tips of our fingers, or rather the click of a mouse, our attention spans have dwindled and we no longer focus on the deeper meaning of what we read, if we read at all. Instead we dehumanize the emotions behind the written word and merely skim for the highlights of articles, abstracts, or stories. Carr worries that the influence the Internet has on our ability to read, comprehend concepts, and analyze topics will be detrimental. Carr is not the only one to notice the changes the Internet has on the way we think and act. While Carr focuses on the effects the Web has on intelligence, reading, and the way in which our brains process information, Dean approaches the human connection the Internet provides, or rather hinders. Both Carr and Dean admit there are benefits to the Internet and the doors it opens, whether in the real or virtual world. They both worry on how much change will occur under its influence. Jodi Dean focuses on the difference between real life communities that emerge on the Web. The term “emerge” is appropriate because such communities spring into being from nothing more than a common interest or the simple fact that the members of such a community were online at the same time. Dean contrasts Internet “cookies” found through online communities with the cookies in the more traditional sense. The former actually describes tracking devices found in online communities that help track your Web activities. This tracking device system is brought up as well in the Identity article by Bolter. By tracking a user’s progress through the Web, a website can tailor its ads to the person’s online interests. The fact that online communities are not simply a way to facilitate communication between individuals who already know one another in the flesh, who are already bound to one another through similar backgrounds, traditions, or geographic locations, but rather associated through online relationships between strangers “infused with feeling, emotion, and affect”. This is a point that Carr makes when discussing Community that Carr completely overlooks. Dean differs from Carr in that he recognizes the feeling that online users put into their communities. In his article, Carr describes the characters in the film 2001. When the characters disassemble the supercomputer “HAL”, they do so in a robotic way, seemingly devoid of all emotion. This worries Carr, who fears that eventually computers and the Internet will cause the emotional and intellectual side of humans to deteriorate. Dean finds in the online communities he studies evidence that this is not yet happening, and may never happen. Although the Internet may have a dismal affect on the thought processes of humans, it certainly does not have the same affect on their emotional processes, at least not yet. Carr cites that HAL, the supercomputer, seems to have the most emotion during the end of the film. This may be so, but Carr overlooks the fact that feelings are necessary for an online community to continue. If the bloggers or other members of the community are not passionate or emotionally connected with the subject of their community there would be no reason for them to continue as a part of it. This indeed can occur, in which case they would simply leave the community. The fact that online communities are thriving is evidence enough that emotion and feeling are still connected with the Web. Communities online began as a promise of “meaningful, personal interconnection”. However, it is apparent that while that was the original concept, the very spirit of a community, the bond of being “in it together” is gone due to the fact that users can log on and off whenever boredom strikes. Users can be thrown out of communities more quickly than Road Runner can connect you to the Internet. The sense of “togetherness” seems to be lost, no matter how hard users try to recreate it online.There are downfalls to online communities, which can be seen every time a new user logs onto the Internet. Communities go beyond the physical body. Once online you can be whoever you want. The problem is so can others. There is no way to shield yourself, your identity from people once you are online. Jay David Bolter speaks about the ways in which the World Wide Web allows individuals to construct their own identities through sites that others can view online. This can go along the same lines with Carr’s fears on how the Internet changes how our minds function. If the Internet can influence and change the way we think, act, and even how we define ourselves, who’s to say who we actually are anymore. If we no longer think for ourselves and we let the Internet take over our identity, what is left? Bolter and Carr agree that thought processes and Identity are being redefined. Carr discusses the many distractions that we face while connected to the internet and the shorter attention spans we subsequently possess. Readers have turned into “power browsers” and now turn to the Internet to avoid reading in the traditional sense altogether. In the education system it is important to slow this abandonment of traditional research and reading. There are ways to be such research is not lost, by making requirements such as having only two references for a research paper be from an Internet Source. Carr and Bolter both agree that expressing ourselves or gathering information is not enough to form who we are. The way in which we read and express ourselves plays a large role in the formation of our mind and identity. The style and speed at which we read will affect what information we pick up and store. The more we rely on the Internet the closer our minds are being shaped to resemble algorithmic artificial intelligence models. Carr fears that if the Google Corporations experiments involving artificial intelligence come together with the already changing ways in which we think, our own intelligence will deflate into artificial intelligence. If our brains ever were supplemented or replaced by an artificial intelligence it would be a fake and incomprehensive intelligence supplement. Bolter lists that the analytical and rational aspects of the human mind would be lost. It is impossible to tell what kind of long term effects the Internet will have on our sense of community, identity, and the ways in which our minds process our thoughts because there are no research results on the subject as of yet. This is due to the rapid evolution the Internet has undergone in the past decade. We are the first generation that will have lived with computers and the Internet our entire lives. I was given my first email address in the first second grade, and even earlier than that I would experience the Internet and other computer technology with my father. As the Internet evolved around our generation, I received my own website and as a teenager began participating in social networks and instant messaging systems. Our generation will be the first example of what it is like to think, read, and research with the full impact of the Internet affecting us our entire lives. Carr is right in worrying that this new technology will be detrimental to the way in which we experience reading novels, articles, research papers, and even long Internet postings. Dean and Bolter are in agreement that although the Internet can supply a sense of community and identity, there is a cost. There is a loss of human connection when the Internet mediates all interactions between two people, or a certain group. In today’s society most teenagers do not read as much as teens and other children did in the early nineties and earlier. Carr’s article asks the question “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, and while it may seem that way to other generations who have not experienced an entire lifetime of the Internet, it seems that there is merely a revolution occurring in the ways in which people think and act. Along with Dean and Bolter’s research on community and identity, Carr should rephrase his question so it reads “Is Google Propelling Positive or Negative Change in Our World”. There is no doubt that the Internet is influencing our generation and changes are beginning to take place. The real question is whether it is the fault of the Internet or the fault of the individual. It is possible to focus deeply on a long novel without breaks. There are individuals in our generation that are completely connected to the Internet and all it has to offer, changes in our thought processes included, that retain the ability to think intellectually and maintain an attention span longer than one minute. If it is possible to maintain emotion and your identity, then it is possible to resist or work with the changes the Internet is introducing into our lives. As Carr stated, he may be simply a skeptic form an older generation. There were those who doubted the television and other technological advances. It all depends on how we as individuals handle the Internet and how much we allow it to change our way of thinking. Google may not be making us stupid, but it is definitely changing our way of life, and it is only a matter of time before we begin to discover how deep of an impact it truly has on our way of life.
Humans are imperfect and inefficient. Compared to a computer, we are slow and forgetful. We are not a species designed for efficiency. We waste too much time with questions of trivial matters that when answered do not succeed in improving our lives. Humans do not work well together either. Each thinks differently and has individual thoughts that interrupt coherent group thinking. If all of humanity were one big computer, nobody in his or her own mind would want one.
However, the Internet essentially is by itself one giant computer created and maintained by humanity. It is also the most used means of communication, and all users of the web effect cyberspace as they would in reality. If the Internet is basically one conflicting and intersecting web, why is it so irresistible and essential to citizens of 21st century society? It may be that the Internet mirrors society in the image that its creators want society of reality to exist. It is a utopia for its creators. It allows an ordinary person to do more with an unlimited potential in cyberspace that that individual could ever imagine doing in reality. God apparently created man in His image. Now it is humanity’s turn to play God. Avatar, the replacement for a face actually comes from a Hindu word avatarana, which is the decent of a deity from incarnate form. What could be more enticing than that?
This idea of creation is interesting because the potential for creation in an existence where there are no limits is infinite. One actually can be more than one person! Try doing that in a world where you are given one existence. In reality it is pretty hard to change an identity that has been developed over a lifetime. However, on the web, one can create multiple personas. These personas can be of a separate gender, race, age, ect.
The counter-argument for this is that these personas are still controlled by a person living in reality. These characters are still extensions of a person. However, the physical aspects of a person do not mean anything on the Internet. Possibly the most intriguing and attractive aspects of cyberspace is that it creates a truly blind society where physical imperfections are not and cannot be judged.
The Web is a faceless society due to the fact that a “face” can be changed at will and therefore does not mean anything. The word is even replaced with a new word, avatar. This faceless society while utopian in some ways creates the problem of an anonymous society. Nobody online ever looks anyone in the eye. The face of a creator on the web is essentially what he or she creates.
However, creation is still a relative term. Nobody online ever truly sees with his or her own eyes what exists online because existence is undefined on the Internet. Whatever is “seen” has to go through some other form where it is translated by a computer. It is more like human-to-computer-to-undefined reality-computer-to-human interaction than just human interaction.
Humans have to adapt to get the most out of this computer translation of the alternate man made universe know as the web. The web is not something that is physical and immersion is limited to what is visible on a small computer screen. In this way the Internet is perfect for human observation. Humans in real life cannot take in every single detail of their world. There are simply too many things. To make things even harder for humanity, reality is always in a state of change. We just simply cannot keep up if we want to take in every detail. The fact that if we just focus on a comparatively tiny computer screen, we can take in every detail without very much effort. Also, unlike in reality we can see exactly what we want immediately without the hassle of making an effort to search for it. The web is all about instant gratification with little effort because it is just so easy. With high speed internet connections, one can surf the web, living in a world that has only what the surfer wants without any of the unwanted “garbage” that is just wasted space and distracts from pure efficiency.
Although the Internet creates a world that is tailored for man, man needs to adapt in order to optimize oneself for using the web to its fullest. One must think like a computer. One must think at the speed of light as information is processed and compressed. There is no such thing or need for abstract thinking. Everything is laid out. Even language is compressed for quicker absorption. With high speed Internet, and powerful search engines, users can jump from one page to another in an instant. No longer does the wait of a page loading force the viewer to fully read the page.
Nobody can deny that the Internet is an extraordinarily powerful tool and resource that has changed humanity. The question is whether this change is actually good for the human race. As stated earlier, humans are not computers. People trade efficiency for interest. People are slow. When people start to act like computers, they lose their humanity.
Humanity isn’t perfect. However, it has done some great things in the past that no computer will ever be able to do. As we “evolve” into cybernetic beings, we lose the essence of our existence. The very definition of creativity is changed. We may be limited by our humanity, but we will be even more limited if we become more like computers.
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