“Lest We Think The Revolution” Summery & quote

Summery: With the article “Lest We Think Revolution” by Selfe, my groups read and analyzed Pg.295-301/P.12-34 or Narrative #1: “The “Global Village” and the “Electronic Colony”. In this section of our reading Selfe talks about Americans and how we react and use technology, mostly referring to the Internet. Selfe believes the Internet eliminates racial and ethic differences. She points out how we are “one among many” in the technological world we live in. Americans also have fear in technology because they do not understand technology completely. Even though we are much afraid, we are also curious because we are, even historically, discoverers. Culturally the Internet connects us all together, creating a communication link. Selfe also believe teamwork is our key to having a good future. Most people don’t know that new technology can benefit their lives in someway or another. Selfe then switches from Internet to advertising, which can also be linked to the Internet. She points out advertising markets target a countries values and how they use images to sell products. Americans try to make it a point to teach and help everyone understand and use technology. Selfe ends with technology might be part of our problems.

Specific Quote I want to use: “As much as Americans might like to think it; technology is not the only solution for all of the world’s problems-and, indeed, might well be a contributing cause to many of them.”

Lest We think the Revolution is a Revolution

In Cynthia L. Selfe's essay "Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution: Images of Technology and the Nature of Change", the topic of gender roles comes up in pages 309-322. Even though ads that portray women may seem to focus on selling the product, it doesn't hide its intent of using women's seduction to sell. This in turn makes women seem as seductresses. The ad in figure 17 barely focus' on the TV, in fact i didn't even notice the TV that they were trying to sell. It focus' on the woman in the ad. Women in ads are portrayed as housekeepers, assistants, mothers and other positions of limited power. Men, however, are portrayed as bosses, business owners, and other positions of power. Even though they both can use technology equally well. In her essay, Selfe writes, "It takes energy and careful thinking to create a landscape in which women can participate in roles other than those of seductress, beauty, or mother; and in which men don't have to bikers or abusers or rabid techno geeks or violent sex maniacs. It is far easier and more comfortable simply to re-construct for ourselves those traditional narratives that tell the same old gender stories over and over again, and that re-create the status quo ever more clearly in their re-telling. (pages 316 & 321)" What Selfe is saying here is that its going to be difficult and time consuming to change our society to allow different roles for men and women. We aren't predestined by our gender. However, its going to be especially hard to change when we have the far easier option of just conforming to the gender stories.

Recently I previewed the documentary, “Growing Up Online,” which was directed and produced by Rachel Dretzin and John Maggio.  Throughout the video I was introduced to different characters, who have different stories dealing with the similar topic of social networking.  Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace have created an instant connection among peers, but they have also influenced more distant relationships.  It’s not uncommon for students to spend an entire day at school interacting with friends just to return home, and continue their conversation over Facebook.  Web sites like Facebook and MySpace not only help friends stay in touch but also help you meet new people.  Although majority of people are who they say they are, an online relationship can only be so close. 

            Jessica Hunters classmates would describe her as a shy girl who typically kept to herself.  She admits that making friends in school was not her forte due to her quite personality, but at age 14 Autumn Edows was created.  Edows was Hunters online identity, whom was the complete opposite of Hunters usual traits.  She was sexy and well known among her hundreds of MySpace friends.  The friends Edows made on the internet saw her as a person she realistically was not.  Because of MySpace, Edows received what she had always strived for, friends, who shared similar perspectives on life.  Through school, Hunter was not able to fulfill the connection among her peers that she was looking for, but MySpace made it possible.

            Facebook and MySpace are two very main social networking sites, but they are not the only ways in which teenagers commutate online.  Many website provide you with information you are searching for as well as a discussion board.  Sarah was a “normal” high school girl, popular among her peers and very outgoing, none of her classmates were under the impression that she had a serious problem.  Although no one she went to school with understood she had a problem, it was no secret. Sarah was struggling with anorexia and often commutated her issue with girls similar to her on the internet.  Unfortunately the advice she would receive from her online “friends” were only making her situation worse by advising her on tips how not to eat.  Although she had many friends at school to talk amongst, she left it unknown. 

            Facebook is certainly encouraging social interaction among peers and friends, but it obviously is not making people any closer.  These social networking sites increase peoples’ abilities to be someone there not.  Although people don’t always do it for bad intentions I have seen it done a lot.  I have seen girls make fake web pages that were only used for a form of bullying or making people upset. 

What Is Google Doing To US?

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” is the name of the article Nicholas Carr wrote where he describes the ways in which technology along with the internet have made people “stupid.” Carr borrows opinions from other people to use as evidence and back up his ideas. One of Carr’s arguments is that even though this new generation is writing more than the past ones; it is not doing us much good because he believes that reading online or texting are not the same as actually reading something that requires more thinking. As evidence to strengthen his idea Carr brings in Maryanne Wolf who is a development psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: Story and science of reading brain. Wolf says that “the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above else, may be weakening our capacity for kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.” So in other words she is saying that all of the reading internet users do online is not the same as reading a book for. When one reads a book it requires a different kind of thinking than when one briefly looks up something on the web. I still believe though that it is better to read something, even if it is cell phone text or online reading material than nothing like the previous generations. The people from the previous generations that didn’t read books never read anything and nowadays those people at least read short pieces of text on cell phones or online.
I do believe though that not everything that we read online has made our writing better. Websites like sparknotes.com have definitely made the lives of some students easier but online services like that are what have made our literature very poor. Instead of reading an entire book because people need to for school purposes; students instead go online to websites like Sparknotes.com and read a brief summary of the book. That is changing the way we think about the reading we do because a summary of anything does not get in depth of what the entire piece of writing is about. It just tells the most important points which are not enough to get our brains working like if we would’ve read the entire book.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In “Is Google Making Us Stupid” Nicholas Carr begins his argument by expressing his concerns about how he is not thinking like he used to. For example he states that he has trouble immersing himself in a book or long article, when this didn’t used to be the case. Now as he reads he starts to figet and eventually stops paying attention to the text that he was reading. Carr states “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski”. (1) Carr believes that the way that he learns things is different now because of his frequent use of the internet. Carr knows that he is not the only one that this is happening to he has friends who are developing the same problem that he has. One man even admits to not reading altogether. Carr appears to be extremely alarmed because he thinks that the internet is making him unable to read for long periods of time.

            As the article goes on Carr starts to talk about Google. Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” because they want to develop the “perfect search engine”. The creators, Sergey Brin and Larry Page want to create artificial intelligence on a larger scale and at the idea of this Carr seems to get angry. Carr becomes angry at the suggestion of artificial intelligence because the internet as it is today has already changed his life by making it hard for him to read long articles or books.

            I agree with Carr, the internet is changing the way we think and learn. However, I think that we are doing it to ourselves. It is our choice to use the internet to find information that we could just as easily find in a book. The internet is dumbing down the current generation and they are making themselves dumb by choice. The internet is a tool that you should use to your advantage but you should not exploit that tool.

Summary: “Is Google Making Us Stupid”

The text, “Is Google making Us Stupid” written by Nicholas Carr, describes technology and the reality of Google in our society. Carr says that “research that once required days in…periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes”. This implies how useful the internet is to him as a writer. He calls the internet “a godsend” and admits that his free time is spent on the web. Carr then goes onto point out the flaws in the internet and how great the impact is on our reading habits. He claims that “the more [we] use the Web, the more [we] have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing”. A study done by the University College London focused on “the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites” and revealed that there was a “form of skimming activity” going on. This means that usually “no more than one or two pages of an article or book “would be read before going to another site. Maryanne Wolf, a psychologist at Tufts University describes our style of reading on the internet as one that “puts ‘efficiency’ and ‘immediacy’ above all else”. She claims that it “may be weakening our capacity for...deep reading that emerged when [the printing press] was invented”. Although the title of the article makes the reader assume that the main focus would be Google, it is not mentioned until the conclusion of the article. Nicholas Carr states Google’s mission statement as wanting to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” Although this mission statement seems harmless, Carr claims that Google views information as “a kind of commodity” and “a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency”. Carr then concludes with stating that “the idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet it is the network’s reigning business model as well”. This implies that although Google claims that the “perfect search engine” is a positive thing for society; their eyes are set on the economic benefit rather than our own.

Of all the claims and assumptions that Carr made throughout this article, one clearly stood out to me as a reader. For some reason, I did not think of “the clock’s methodical ticking” as society-changing. Nor did I believe that it was as significant to our daily lives as it really is. Carr claims that this invention “helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man [but also took something away]”. That something was the basic idea of timekeeping. He states that “we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock”. When I read this, my mind was blown. Every day I follow a routine that I follow based on the clock; I wake up and go to classes at a certain time. Without the clock, my schedule would be thrown out the window and my life would most likely be turned upside-down.

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

In Nicholas Carr's essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" he starts off by talking about his own experience over the past few years with technology and how it has affected him. Carr brings his ideas of technology into play when he says that technology has been changing his brain and the way he thinks. Carr says he's not thinking the way he used to think and his concentration is scarce. He then goes on to bring in Clive Thompson and Marshall McLuhan; McLuhan backs up Carr by saying, "Media are not just passive channels of information, They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation."(para.3) Carr's essay contintues with strong evidence about the net chipping away concentration with qoutes from Scott Karp a blogger and Bruce Friedman another blogger who blogs about computers in medicine; they both have had trouble absorbing long bits of information and they also blame the net. Carr next talks about a published study of online research habits conducted by scholars from University College of London and they suggested that we may be in the midst of change in the way we read and think. Carr brings another idea to the table when he says "Thanks to the ubiquity of test on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice."(para.7) Is our generation becoming stupid or smarter? Carr doesn't specify yet; but he does continue with this idea that a communications system has never played so many roles in our lives or had such intense influence over our thoughts than the internet does today.