Annotated Bibliography & Outline

1) Thompson's Claim: "This evidence suggests that not only has this generation’s writing  has improved, but their ability to discuss and debate is slowly becoming that of the ancient Greeks; who were known to be the grandmasters of discussion." (From my Thompson Paper)

2) My own sub-claim: By perusing [particular] kinds of forums & social networks, one can come across a wealth of rhetoric and information.

3) Source 1: CGP Grey. "What Is Reddit?" YouTube. CGP Grey, 9 Sept. 2013. Web. 23 Nov. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlI022aUWQQ>.

This video provides a very brief, yet pretty darn good explanation of reddit, which will be one of the topics I discuss in my paper.

Unit 4 [Tentative Anecdote]

First, I'd like to state that this is totally tentative, and may be completely re-written during the development of this final paper, but this is what I have so far. For those of you interested and don't think my explanation of reddit did it justice, take a look at this video.

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

November 19, 2014

Anecdote As Evidence (Paper 4)

            The Internet first impacted my lifestyle when I was about nine years old. Since then, I’ve been playing video games, posting on online forums, making connections, or doing some odd combination of the three. For many, especially people around my parents’ age, this is strange. I come home with an A on a paper I wrote, and soon enough my parents call bullshit and ask me if I plagiarized. Why? My parents reasoning is they don’t see me read – they just see me on a computer for about eight hours a day or longer. From anyone’s point of view, those eight hours go to playing video games, reading some posts on reddit (which I will discuss later in this piece), and what appears to be speaking to thin air or an imaginary friend.

            In my opinion, the internet media that affects my mental cognition the most is reddit.

                        What is reddit? For much of the internet, reddit is the gateway to everything                                 interesting going on in the world. Checking reddit.com is like reading the                                       newspaper, except that reddit is timely, interactive, personalized, participatory,                                     horrifyingly absorbing at times, and basically good (CGP Grey)

Reddit is great for discovering new things, from scientific discoveries to cute cat videos. A typical post on reddit has the following: a catchy one-liner title, an accompanying article/picture, a brief description, and lastly (and most importantly), a comments section. The comments section of a reddit post, like many other comments sections on other forms of media, is where minds who just got exposed to a piece of media collaborate and discuss said media. In the case of reddit, some of these conversations are wildly intellectual, and some are just downright cringe-worthy. But what makes reddit different than other internet hubs with a comments section? Well, with reddit comes a slew of “subreddits”, smaller forums within reddit that discuss a particular topic. There’s subreddits for cats, science, college, video games, and even things people find mildly interesting. Reddit has variety, and once a user finds their niche within this variety, collaboration between complete strangers comes into play.

            When I take a break from studies or video games (or even while I’m playing video games), I’m typically on reddit. Most of the time, I check the front page to see what’s trending amongst users. It usually ranges from intellectual The Atlantic or Huffington Post articles open to discussion, scandalous celebrity gossip, mildly interesting scientific facts, or a question of the day. The front page and its trending topics usually change within the next 45 minutes, so you never get exposed to the same stuff over and over again. But what’s important here is what people are saying about these things. I come across classy one-liners, lengthy expressions of opinion, to poor 5^th grade writing. Not only am I exposed to new information, I’m also exposed to new opinions and viewpoints.

RWS 100 Group Work [Carr & Encyclopedia Britannica.

A full version of our work can be found here, notes included.

200 ~ 300 Word Summary

A lot of Encyclopedia Britannica’s forum posts seem to be a slew of replies to either Carr directly or other critics of Carr. For example, Clay Shirky replies to Carr twice, the first time to address his article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, and the second time in reply to Carr’s reply of Shirky’s reply (confusing, isn’t it). In Shirky’s first reply, he critiques Carr’s generalization of “literary types” as well as Carr’s claim that the internet is impacting the way we read. Shirky presses a counter-argument, saying that the internet has actually brought back reading as an activity -- just in a different way. Shirky also dubs Carr’s worrywarting as a sort of pseudo-Luddism (Luddism is the philosophy/opposition of new forms of technology), and calls it wasted intelligence on Carr’s part.

Carr [Final Draft]

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

November 12, 2014

[Insert Title Later]

            The internet can be considered the printing press of our generation. Like the printing press, there were skeptics and advocates – each with their own beliefs that the invention could help or hurt the future. If Clive Thompson, author of “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Lives for the Better”, can considered an internet advocate -- then Nicholas Carr, author of the book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” and The Atlantic Article “Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Alternatively, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?)” can be considered an internet skeptic. Carr, who studied at prestigious higher-education institutes such as Dartmouth and Harvard, is one of the big-names of internet skeptics. Both his book and The Atlantic article have been wide topics of discussion regarding the internet’s impact on this generation. While he commends the internet for its wide variety of uses, he also criticizes it for its harmful effects – provided one uses it for a long period of time. These harmful effects aren’t life-threatening. According to Carr, the internet impairs ones cognitive ability, and other quality-of-life functions; and in order to make his case, Carr uses several rhetorical strategies ranging from events in history to personal accounts. With these rhetorical strategies, Carr intends to convince the reader that continuous use of the internet is a huge hindrance for the world of literacy and cognition –  the internet is the bane of readers and writers of long texts.  In this piece, I will analyze Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for strategies he uses to persuade his readers.

            Carr takes a moment the express his feelings towards the internet with clever use of the 1960’s “classic” 2001: Space Odyssey. Carr claims that his frequent use of the internet messes up his brain how Dave messed up HAL’s circuitry, ultimately shutting HAL down. Why Space Odyssey? Was it to get his readers to Google it? Or maybe it was a way to convey his feelings towards the internet in a clever way. If one thinks about it in the latter, it makes sense.

                        Over the past few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or                                     something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry …                               my mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the                              way I used to think … my mind would get caught up in the narrative, and I’d                           spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case                            anymore (Carr).

            At this point in the article, Carr doesn’t directly attribute these “uncomfortable senses” to the internet, yet. Carr then reveals his realization, the reason why his brain and his literacy have hit a wall.

                        For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online. The Web                              has been a godsend to me as a writer … Even when I’m not working; I’m likely                                   as not to be foraging in the Web’s information thickets … And what the Net                             seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and                                        contemplation. I was once a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the                              surface like a guy on a Jet Ski (Carr).

            Scuba diving is relatively slow-paced, requires plenty of training, and is a visually stunning experience. On the other hand, jet-skiing is fast, requires very little training, and is rather showy. Simply looking over the metaphor, Carr could be comparing his pace of reading using scuba diving and jet-skiing, the former relative to slowly absorbing information and the latter to speeding and skimming all around.

            By combining 2001: Space Odyssey and his scuba diver to Jet Ski metaphor, Carr is trying to develop an emotional connection with the reader, an attempt at the Aristotelean appeal of Pathos. By describing how his reading habits have changed over his prolonged use of the internet over the span of a few years, Carr is trying to get the reader to [possibly] come to the same realization that maybe the internet has indeed negatively affected cognitive function. Once the reader has come to that realization, Carr has successfully connected to the reader on an emotional level. Provided that The Atlantic’s main demographic is that of educated readers and writers, it is possible that their minds too have lost the same capacity for concentration as Carr had.

            Carr introduces Nietzsche, a German philosopher whose ideals were adopted by the Nazi regime. In Nietzsche’s time [the 1860s], the typewriter was a relatively new invention. Nietzsche struggled with hand cramps, and as such adopted the typewriter as his new medium to continue publishing philosophical texts.

                        But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a                             composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had                          become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument                            even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own                            work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen                            and paper” (Carr).

While the typewriter helped Nietzsche, it also hurt his writing style. Carr identifies Nietzsche and the typewriter as an example of new technology which had affected cognitive function. While Nietzsche’s change of writing style isn’t exactly negative, it’s the idea that there was a cognitive change due to new technology that Carr wanted to highlight. With this, Carr has introduced evidence that the internet isn’t the only piece of technology that has impaired some form of literacy, in this case, writing. It’s happened in the past, and to prove it, Carr introduced the historical evidence.

            Past films and philosophers aside, Carr also has some time-relevant evidence to offer in “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. Carr cites (and hyperlinks) a study of online research habits conducted by scholars from University College London. “As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of two popular research sites, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of information” (Carr). The University’s study led to the conclusion that the research sites’ visitors showed activity collectively known as “skimming”, which is to read something quickly and take note only on the things the reader finds important. “They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site” (Carr). Carr and Maryanne Wolf, a development psychologist at Tufts University, criticize skimming, calling it “a style of reading that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, [which] may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace” (Carr). Wolf claims that our interpretations of texts may have been affected by the use of the internet. “Our ability to interpret texts … remains largely disengaged” (Carr). By citing a study which observed internet users’ reading habits and seeking professional opinion on them, Carr attempts to establish the fact that the internet is altering cognitive function in literacy and prose. Before introducing Wolf and the University’s study, Carr has been establishing this fact in the form of historical evidence and personal accounts. Now armed with relevant evidence, Carr uses it to further prove his main argument.

            But, there are issues with University College London’s conclusions and Wolf’s accusations on skimming. The first issue is with the test subjects of the study. Carr’s summary of the study does not include the common demographic of the research sites’ visitors. Research sites are typically used by many different people, ranging from middle school to college students and further extend to those with doctorates. Because of this, the data on the sample group and their perusing habits can become skewed. If Carr included more information about the University’s study group, say it focused on people in the 18 to 35 age group (which would also be about the same age range as a good portion of Carr’s readers), Carr could have made much stronger arguments about the discovered skimming habits and the reader may be more convinced because the arguments are even more relevant to the reader. The second issue regards Wolf’s bashing on the idea of skimming. Much of today’s writing comes in the form of [semi] professional research papers and other pieces which involve sampling other work. For a writer, it’s not very common to read a text from start to finish identifying an idea they’d like to work with. It takes too much time, and efficiency, which Wolf does note. But in a world with due dates and time constraints, it’s too expensive in a sense to give up efficiency. While Wolf does make some valid points, the idea of “efficiency and immediacy” shouldn’t directly relate to a decrease in cognitive function.

            Overall, Carr did not convince me. While he did strive to introduce evidence new and old, his motives behind including them in “Is Google Is Making Us Stupid” can be unclear. Also, some of his evidence had noticeable holes which can lead to questions and a decline in credibility. While we might be doing a lot more skimming, we’re also doing a lot more writing. In my introduction, I highlighted Clive Thompson, who I described as an “internet advocate”. Summarizing the first part of his book, “Smarter Than You Think”, Thompson concludes people in this generation are doing a lot of writing. While some of it might be utter garbage, it’s still writing. And I believe that this increase in writing, which arguably could lead to an increase in cognitive function, outweighs this decrease in cognitive function that Carr tries to identify because of prolonged internet use.

Carr Draft 3 [For Critique Professor Critique]

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

November 9, 2014

[Insert Title Later]

            The internet can be considered the printing press of our generation. Like the printing press, there were skeptics and advocates – each with their own beliefs that the invention could help or hurt the future. If Clive Thompson, writer of “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Lives for the Better”, can considered an internet advocate -- then Nicholas Carr, writer of the book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” and The Atlantic Article “Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Alternatively, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?)” can be considered an internet skeptic. Carr, who studied at prestigious higher-education institutes such as Dartmouth and Harvard, is one of the big-names of internet skeptics. Both his book and The Atlantic article have been wide topics of discussion regarding the internet’s impact on this generation. While he commends the internet for its wide variety of uses, he also criticizes it for its harmful effects – provided one uses it for a long period of time. These harmful effects aren’t life-threatening. According to Carr, the internet impairs ones cognitive ability, and other quality-of-life functions; and in order to make his case, Carr uses several rhetorical strategies ranging from events in history to personal accounts. In this piece, I will analyze Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for strategies he uses to persuade his readers.

            Carr conveys his emotions to the reader in different ways. Particularly, he compares his feelings towards the internet to that of the 1960’s “classic” 2001: Space Odyssey. Carr claims that his frequent use of the internet messes up his brain how Dave messed up HAL’s circuitry, ultimately shutting HAL down. “ Carr uses 2001: Space Odyssey in both his opening and closing. This could refer to the Aristotelian appeal to Pathos – the way a writer conveys his/her feelings to get a point across to the reader. While several appeals to pathos are present in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, the pathos appeals via 2001: Space Odyssey are quite hard to miss, since they’re very prevalent in this article.

            Carr spends a few paragraphs on Nietzsche, a German philosopher whose ideals were adopted by the Nazi regime. In Nietzsche’s time [the 1860s], the typewriter was a relatively new invention. Nietzsche struggled with hand cramps, and as such adopted the typewriter as his new medium to continue publishing philosophical texts.

                        But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a                          composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had                           become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument                             even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own                              work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen                               and paper” (Carr).

Carr denotes the changes in Nietzsche’s writing style, all because of the change to a new piece of technology. While it helped Nietzsche to write again, it also hurt his writing style. Carr’s purpose in identifying Nietzsche and his typewriter issues was to 1) connect the typewriter to the internet, as both were relatively new technology in their respective times and 2) show the reader that the internet wasn’t the only piece of technology to affect function.

            For the first few paragraphs of “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Carr’s main evidence is in the form of anecdotes. They can be relatable, almost up to the point where the writer is spelling out the reader’s life. While anecdotes are one of the more popular ways of captivating a reader, they have a drawback: not everyone can relate to anecdotes. What if the reader isn’t like Carr’s interviewee, Bruce Friedman? Not all of Carr’s readers are pathologists and read “War and Peace” for fun – so why should the reader care? But before the reader completely dismisses Carr before getting a quarter into the article, Carr pulls quite the rhetorical move. “Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition” (Carr). Here, Carr is addressing his readers who aren’t Bruce Friedman – those who can’t resonate with Carr’s anecdotal evidence.

            This brief use of prolepsis attempts to earn back the attention of the readers he may have lost and introduce a new piece of evidence: a study performed by University College London. Briefly put, the study observed trends of research website visitors.

                        They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,”                            hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d                              already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or              book before they would “bounce” out to another site (Carr).

Carr generalizes this skimming to ideas of “efficiency and immediacy above all else” and it “may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace (Carr). But here’s an issue with this generalization: when it comes to this new generation of writing, it’s not very commonplace to read a whole text in search of an idea or piece of evidence – from start to finish at least. While efficiency plays a role in this, it shouldn’t be immediately generalized into a negative change in cognitive function. Unless of course, Carr read through the whole study conducted by University College London, start to finish reaching said generalization, which I personally doubt.

            And that’s my main issue with “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. Not everyone shares the same habits when using the Internet. You can’t generalize the cognitive function someone who uses the internet for cat videos and someone else who uses it for source material, because they’re using the Internet for two separate reasons. I doubt there’s some kind of efficiency factor when it comes to finding a cute cat video. It seems like one of Carr’s main arguments is that Internet users are so hell-bent on efficiency that it’s degrading cognitive function, and efficiency doesn’t apply to all aspects of the internet.

Paper 3 [Two Paragraphs Flushed Out (Intro and Paragraph 2)]

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

November 6, 2014

[Insert Title Later]

            The internet can be considered the printing press of our generation. Like the printing press, there were skeptics and advocates – each with their own beliefs that the invention could help or hurt the future. If Clive Thompson, writer of “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Lives for the Better”, can considered an internet advocate -- then Nicholas Carr, writer of the book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” and The Atlantic Article “Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Alternatively, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?)” can be considered an internet skeptic. Carr, who studied at prestigious higher-education institutes such as Dartmouth and Harvard, is one of the big-names of internet skeptics. Both his book and The Atlantic article have been wide topics of discussion regarding the internet’s impact on this generation. While he commends the internet for its wide variety of uses, he also criticizes it for its harmful effects – provided one uses it for a long period of time. These harmful effects aren’t life-threatening. According to Carr, the internet impairs ones cognitive ability, and other quality-of-life functions; and in order to make his case, Carr uses several rhetorical strategies ranging from events in history to personal accounts. In this piece, I will analyze Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for strategies he uses to persuade his readers.

            About three-quarters into “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr begins to address his skeptics. “Yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism … the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different” (Carr). Besides directly addressing his skeptics, Carr conveys his emotions to the reader in different ways. Particularly, he compares his feelings towards the internet to that of the 1960’s “classic” 2001: Space Odyssey. Carr claims that his frequent use of the internet messes up his brain how Dave messed up HAL’s circuitry, ultimately shutting HAL down. “ Carr uses 2001: Space Odyssey in both his opening and closing. This could refer to the Aristotelian appeal to Pathos – the way a writer conveys his/her feelings to get a point across to the reader. While several appeals to pathos are present in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, the pathos appeals via 2001: Space Odyssey are quite hard to miss, since they’re very prevalent in this article. While I’m relatively uncultured when it comes to movies from the 1960s, I’m certain that these appeals to pathos are quite effective when it comes to reaching to the reader. In a way, the reader understands Carr’s feelings and sympathizes with them – to an extent. If I knew more about this film, chances are I would sympathize with Carr’s feelings even more.

            Carr spends a few paragraphs on Nietzsche, a German philosopher whose ideals were adopted by the Nazi regime. In Nietzsche’s time [the 1860s], the typewriter was a relatively new invention. Nietzsche struggled with hand cramps, and as such adopted the typewriter as his new medium to continue publishing philosophical texts.

                        But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a                             composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had                          become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument                            even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own                            work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen                            and paper” (Carr).

Carr denotes the changes in Nietzsche’s writing style, all because of the change to a new piece of technology. While it helped Nietzsche to write again, it also hurt his writing style. Carr’s purpose in identifying Nietzsche and his typewriter issues was to 1) connect the typewriter to the internet, as both were relatively new technology in their respective times and 2) show the reader that the internet wasn’t the only piece of technology to affect function.

Paper 3 Draft 1 (1 intro 2 bodies)

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

November 3, 2014

[Insert Title Later]

            The internet can be considered the printing press of our generation. Like the printing press, there were skeptics and advocates – each with their own beliefs that the invention could help or hurt the future. If Clive Thompson, writer of “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Lives for the Better”, can considered an internet advocate -- then Nicholas Carr, writer of the book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” and The Atlantic Article “Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Alternatively, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?)” can be considered an internet skeptic. Carr, who studied at prestigious higher-education institutes such as Dartmouth and Harvard, is one of the big-names of internet skeptics. Both his book and The Atlantic article have been wide topics of discussion regarding the internet’s impact on this generation. In this piece, I will analyze Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for strategies he uses to persuade his readers.

            About three-quarters into “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr begins to address his skeptics. “Yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism … the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different” (Carr). Besides directly addressing his skeptics, Carr conveys his emotions to the reader in different ways. Particularly, he compares his feelings towards the internet to that of the 1960’s “classic” 2001: Space Odyssey. Carr claims that his frequent use of the internet messes up his brain how Dave messed up HAL’s circuitry, ultimately shutting HAL down. “ Carr uses 2001: Space Odyssey in both his opening and closing. This could refer to the Aristotelian appeal to Pathos – the way a writer conveys his/her feelings to get a point across to the reader. While several appeals to pathos are present in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, the pathos appeals via 2001: Space Odyssey are quite hard to miss, since they’re very prevalent in this article. While I’m relatively uncultured when it comes to movies from the 1960s, I’m certain that these appeals to pathos are quite effective when it comes to reaching to the reader. In a way, the reader understands Carr’s feelings and sympathizes with them – to an extent. If I knew more about this film, chances are I would sympathize with Carr’s feelings even more.

            Nietzsche, a German philosopher whose ideals were adopted by Nazis, is a topic of discussion in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. Carr goes about Nietzsche’s use of the typewriter.

                        But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a                             composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had                          become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument                            even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own                            work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen                            and paper” (Carr).

Carr denotes the changes in Nietzsche’s writing style, all because of the change to a new piece of technology. While it helped Nietzsche to write again, it also hurt his writing style. This kind of identification was a strong way of getting his point across to the reader. While it’s not the internet, I did mention before that in a way, the internet is like today’s typewriter.