blog post #2

I agree that internet technologies are changing the human mind in unpredictable ways and are damaging our memories and attention spans. We are not reading and thinking as we were 20 years ago. Now that we have machines and new technologies, it helps us take the easy way out. Google for example helps us find the correct answer quickly. We don’t need to waste our time reading through a lot because Google already finds it for us.

I remember while in middle school it would take days to write a report. We would go to the library, read books and go online and do the research and then write the report. Now we can write up a report in a couple of hours because we do our research quicker or rather the computer does it for us so we don’t even have to do the research ourselves anymore.

Maryanne Wolf states, “We are not only what we read, we are how we read”. In this quote I think she meant that because we are so used to reading short passages,  we only want to read short passages. I love to read long books so if I have to read a long article or passage, I’m fine with it. I have friends that they can’t concentrate if the article is too long. They start dozing off the page.

James Olds, a professor of neuroscience says that “The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.” I think he meant that we can change the way we learn and think. I think if we read more, then we would be able to concentrate more on reading.