Death by internet

          Reading this article provided a good perspective on how much we actually depend on the internet and how dumb it is making us. While reading Carr's article about how reading on the internet has proven difficult in the sense that people are easily distracted, I found myself starting to get distracted merely by the advertisements on the side of the page. The layout of the webpage alone is drawing me away from the article that was posted on their website. Hyperlinks try to lure me to videos or other articles that they think I would be interested in. I almost had to cover one side of the laptop so that I would not be distracted by the pictures and big bold letters on the right side of the article. I'm pretty sure that nearly everyone that is going to college in the U.S. and even all around the world are almost required to use the internet, whether it's for studying or just to be able to contact their teacher to ask a simple question. The scary part about the internet as a whole is that in the end it may end up controlling us or even just used to keep us in check. I am not talking about Skynet coming online or anything like that, it just feels like whenever I go online I'm being shown what the computer wants me to see or what it thinks I want to see and recently I have figured out that it is doing exactly that. According to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, they are trying to create an artificial intelligence on a large scale. Just from hearing that, it scares me to think that there may be an artificial intelligence smarter than me showing me what I want to see. If this is the case then I will never be able to have my own perspective on things without a computer telling me what my perspective is.

          The Internet or even search engines are not all that bad. Carr brings up good points about how helpful they can be when trying to find good information when writing or studying. This simple technology is able to bring us a much simpler way of finding out information from world news, or to finding out what your friends are doing that night. Carr's article is not about swaying someone to one side of this argument or the other, he merely wants to bring to light what is happening with the internet and how it may affect us. He even uses earlier works of philosophers like Plato and Humanist Squarciafico to show that history repeats itself and that we will always have worries when it comes to the advancement of technology and the sharing of information. The best part about this writing is that he intends to inform us using the perspectives and writings of others so that we can have a better picture to make up our own mind.