My Carr Summary

In Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" he finds a recently published study of online research habits conducted by scholars from University College London. The scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites that provide access to journal articles, e-books and other sources of written info. They found that people using the sites revealed "a form of skimming activity" jumping from one place to the other and rarely coming back to anything they'd already visited. Typically reading no more than 1 or 2 pages of an article before skipping to the next site, sometimes saving long articles but there’s no proof if they actually went back to it and read. In their recent work they suggest that it’s obvious users are not reading in a traditional sense, there is a new form of reading and its is called "power browsing" claiming that online users skim "horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts." Only getting what they need and exiting.

Carr implicates technology is changing the way we may think and read when he mentions "thanks to txt on the internet, the popularity of txt messaging on cells" that we may be reading more today than we did back in the day but it's a "different kind of reading, behind it lies a different kind of thinking." The style of reading the internet’s promoting may be weakening our ability for deep reading. What do I think? Keep to the roots of original traditional reading, try not to let technology take over your life. The classic way is always best.