Week 4 Readings

Our readings for week 4 addressed the way that we get information much quicker. In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Carr makes a great point in that he just quickly looks for information instead of learning the subject. I’ve done the exact thing that’s he done where I know I can just quickly look up information if I have a question. I barely remember the question I answered because I know I can just look up the question again if I forget. We don’t think anymore as a society because we allow the internet to do it for us. That was another point that Carr brought up which I agreed with because we don’t actually do research. Instead we let search engines tell us how to think. Clay Shirky disagrees with Carr by stating in his article, Does the Internet Make You Smarter, by stating that it’s human evolution to get things quicker. However, I think that by slowly researching topics, you’ll learn more about them.

The other readings focused on multitasking. Even though the YouTube article didn’t specifically discuss multitasking, YouTube can be the reason why people multitask. In his article, Henry Jenkins points out that YouTube is the meeting point for everything to come together. However, combining this with the article by Clay Shirky called, Why I just asked to Put Their Laptops Away, shows all of the negative effects of multitasking. One of the reasons why multitasking is so hard is because of all of the distractions that occur and nobody can focus on just one thing. If YouTube is where everything comes together, then how can we focus on all of it at once?

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