6 Questions Regarding Carr

Somehow I neglected to copy this out of my notebook and onto this blog...
I must be the only teenager in the world who is bad at managing tasks on the web.


Anyway, here is a link to Nicholas Carr's article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/


I've come up with six questions I have about Carr's claims. They are:


1. Is it true that reading is "not an instinctive skill for human beings?" That it's "not etched into our genes the way speech is?" Sure, it's certain that, "We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand." But we also have to teach ourselves how to interpret all the strange sounds adults throw at us as infants, and learn to utilize them ourselves. 


Of course  the ability to speak arose in humans before the development of writing. Still, our capacity for written language has been evolving along with us as well. In addition, studies involving feral children have shown that they have almost no capacity for language. Due to lack of stimulation, the areas of the brain which control language are often underdeveloped. This makes me wonder if speech is really as "natural" of a function as Carr argues, or if both reading and speech are heavily dependent upon nurture.


Sources: 
http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/LangTeach/Licence/CM/OldLectures/L3_ExtremeCircs.htm


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_children


Sorry, I got a little carried away there.


2. Carr's article focuses primarily on books and the internet as sources of practical information. Do people, when they do choose to read for pleasure, still primarily enjoy fiction books offline? How many "entertainment" books are sold in hard copy vs. as e-books?


3. Do " 'thoughts' in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper?" Is the internet changing not just our reading but our writing? Our crayon experiment relates to this question.


4. Is "deep reading indistinguishable from deep thinking?"


5. There are vast amounts of information on the internet, but that hardly means much of it is correct. Anyone can post their opinion or self publish, whereas in the past, one generally had to find a legitimate source to publish their work. Because of this, are academic standards being lowered? Is the pursuit of knowledge in general being cheapened?


6. In the modern world, do we need to optimize our time more than we did in the past? Do we live in a faster paced society where spending days in the library is just no longer an option? Is this new method of "skim reading" now necessary for survival?


Many of Carr's ideas about the way we search for information are similar to Gopnik's. Gopnik even begins his article "How the Internet Gets Inside Us" by reflecting upon Google. I would classify Carr as one of Gopnik's "Better Never's," as he is wary of the changes the web is inflicting upon us.