Nicholas Carr writes an article called, Is Google making us stupid?” It doesn’t have to do so much with Google making us stupid but with all the ads and snippets of information we obtain using database searches. Americans can find anything online and instead of reading books, we read lots of bits and pieces. The media has to adapt, change and shift because of the new uses that technology has presented the American public with.
Nicholas Carr claims,” Traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-ups ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info snippets.” Carr suggests that the old technology needs to catch up to the American’s brain and way of thinking today.
The evidence is from a man by the name of Tom Bodkin a design director who works for the New York Times. Bodkin decides to take the second and third page of every edition of the article abstracts. He explains that it would give each reader just an efficient “taste” of the day’s news, that way you wouldn’t have to read the whole newspaper but just snippets.
The ads are everywhere which can be annoying at times but are helpful to a business wanting to thrive by using the internet, televisions and roadways to catch Americans at any moment, to consume.
Carr himself writes, “I am not thinking the way I used to think.” In other words, these word or article searches are creating a new pattern of thinking. Carr used to sit down and read through a book but now he gets distracted and loses concentration on the topic.
The American public is being bombarded with ads that jump at us from everywhere yet we must be able to process all this information without being dumbed down. Instead of the American society reading a book, we try to sustain the information that is being thrown at us and learn from many sources instead of just one idea.
Welcome!
Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversations Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!
--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!
--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100
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