Internet, Information Technology and Our Brain

Internet,
  Information Technology
          and
            Our Brain

Elvis Januskevicius
Student number: 2003732
Words: 707
Dr. Remco Knooihuizen
The growing use of information technology and reliance on the Internet as the main means of communication, acquiring information is changing the way our brain works and the way we think. Such activities as skimming and hyperlinking are influencing our ability to concentrate and focus, in other words, our cognitive abilities. The current view of the Internet and information technology as just a medium, delivery system, social and portable is making us more depressed and anxious, having harder grasp to concentrate, as a result of the way we think and the way our brain works.
A prominent scholar Nicholas Carr, the author of the book “The Shallows”, has dedicated most of his work to study how the Internet and other information technologies affect us. “My mind isn’t going so far as I can tell- but it’s changing. I am not thinking the way I used to think. I think I know what’s going on, for more then a decade I’ve been spending a lot of time online,” writes the author. Scholars from University College London have conducted a five year research program, which focused on documenting the behaviour of visitors to two research sites that provide access to journals articles, e-books and other sources of information. Results of the research program showed that there is a new kind of form of reading, called skimming. Researchers describe it as an activity involved in hoping from one source to another and rarely returning to any previous source.1 The good side of the Internet, is that we have more information and we read more. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking.2 A psychologist at Tufts University, Maryanne Wolf, worries that the fashion of how people read on the Net puts productivity and urgency above all else. When we read online we tend to become mere decoders of...