These four articles discussed whether or not new communication technologies are helping or hurting us. In the first article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” the author points out how since the development of new communication technologies, he has had trouble keeping his mind focused on lengthier tasks. Because new communication technologies are able to give us the information we want without us having to think, we as humans have forgotten how to think. This somewhat relates to the article “Why I Just Asked My Students to Put Their Laptops Away”. In this article, the author discusses how it is biologically impossible to resist checking our phones when they beep and light up with a new notification. This shows how quickly we abandon one task to go to another because our brains are automatically drawn to whatever is happening in our phones.
On the other hand, the article “Does the Internet Make You Smarter” suggests that we should not be fearful of new communication technologies. The author mentions how once there was a time when people were fearful of writing because they didn’t think they would remember spoken word anymore. This implies that there may come a time in the future where people wonder why we were so fearful of new communication technologies because they turned out to be way more helpful than ever imagined. This ties into the article “The Cultural Theory of YouTube” when the author discusses how YouTube is beneficial in terms of generating all different kinds of content and having them all intermingle with each other.