I love when my classes intertwine! The videos that we watched on Monday reminded me of a lot of aspects of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. This was an assigned reading for my other DTC class and Carr discusses a lot about the ways in which technology is completely changing the human brain.
I also discussed parts from Carr in my midterm project, but something that both the book and the videos from Monday’s class touch on is the obvious changes to our mentality towards life. Carr discusses the inability to focus on long readings and how difficult it is to make it through a book. Thanks to technology our attention span in shortening as we gain skills in browsing and skimming. Our brains are have access to SO much information that we are overloading our brains with new things and might not be learning singular things thoroughly. It definitely has it’s ups and downs.
As students in this generation we have become used to the bombardment of information that comes with the easy access to technology. But I think we are suffering from some of the things that Carr writes about in The Shallows. We are so used to the fast paced world of the internet that we lose patience in other aspects of our lives. Patience is one thing that we all are losing because we are so used to everything being uploaded in seconds!
Source:
Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print.
Medolan's Blog 
I thought your middle paragraph, in particular, was interesting:
“Carr discusses the inability to focus on long readings and how difficult it is to make it
through a book. Thanks to technology our attention span in shortening as we gain skills in
browsing and skimming. Our brains are have access to SO much information that we are
overloading our brains with new things and might not be learning singular things
thoroughly.”
There have been several times where I’ve wondered whether or not being able to google something was more beneficial or more harmful to us. On the one hand, if we ever have a topic or question we’d like to know more about, with the help of the internet it’s safe to say we will most likely find answers (or at least get us started on the path to finding the answers ourselves). At the same time, the ability to look things up at any time in a matter of seconds also “motivates” us not to retain information as well. A personal example of this can be seen at my job. As Life editor for The Daily Evergreen, I have to make sure that the correct writing style is followed through all of my content. With all of the rules of AP style, it can be trying to remember things like which states have what abbreviation (they’re different from how we usually abbreviate). Often I find myself looking up little things like this on a weekly basis simply because I have access to these rules at my fingertips.