artifact 3

This weeks video talks about how technology could be bad for us because it makes us not want to focus on things that we use to easily be able to focus on.  The speaker of the video uses the example of how when he sits down to read a book he always gets easily distracted by the common things that most people do today like checking their email, facebook, surfing the web, or messing with their cell phone.  It seems like that happens easily with me as well when i try to write a paper or do other homework.  With all of the new technology today most people are so interested in trying to keep up with it and figure out what is going on at the current time that it is hard for them to concentrate on the task at hand.  The speaker in this video, Nicholas Carr, also talks about how just putting the spaces between words is a rather new invention in history compared to the millions of years that the earth has been around.  Before 1000 years ago there was not any spaces between words, so when spaces were invented it became a huge invention and helped people read much easier than they did before because they could figure out when new words started and ended.  Then when the printing press was invented that made it very easy to read because more people were exposed to books because it was very easy to print them.  Now the new big thing is the internet so the great new advancements just keep coming.  He talks about how now that it is so easy to multitask on the web that it is easy for us to make our attention go elsewhere.  He says this might hurt our ability to learn because we do not have as many deep thoughts because now we think about so many things at once and are extracted so easily that we do not think about one thing long enough for much deep thinking.  I think this is common in this day and age because with me many times I will start thinking of something else and totally forget what I was thinking of before that.  He also says how this effects our short term and long term memories because there is so many things to think about that we never think about stuff long enough to store it in our long term memory.  His opinions sound very right on this matter because it is very important that people have better memories and internet will continue to hurt this because the technology will keep making it easier and easier to multitask.  The brain is large but it continues to have very much information that it has to be able to comprehend so if we keep feeding it more information by concentrating on a bunch of different subjects on the internet then we will continue to have problems with focusing on one certain task or goal.  This book sounds very interesting because it is a very imortant debate in society today about how much internet hurts or helps every persons brain power.