CLAM #5: New Media, New Literacies

I could definitely relate to the articles for this week's assignments. As I read "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" I found myself distracted, and it actually took me a while to focus on the article and actually just sit down and read it, which is exactly what the article was talking about. I think I agreed with article much more in general. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Google. I use Google Chrome (although the internet here seems to hate it and only Internet Explorer is working), gmail, and iGoogle. It's easy-to-use and you can find practically anything on it. But reading about the creators' visions of artificial intelligence really creeped me out. Is Google taking over? And why can't we just be satisfied with the huge amount of progress we've made already? I know that it's our nature to constantly improve things, but I've seen enough Sci-Fi movies to know that creating a machine that is more intelligent than a human brain is a bad idea.

That's all I have to say about Google taking over, so now on to the actual prompt. In Carr's article, he mentions how a friend of Nietzsche's commented on the differences in his writing style when he changed his medium from hand-writing to typewriting. I think this is true. For example, with my blogs, they turn into a stream-of-thought process, because I can type fast enough to [almost] keep up with my thoughts. When I am hand-writing something, there is more of a planning process- I usually do some kind of outline, organize my thoughts more, get into a "zone" and get to work. When I'm on a computer, I just kind of go with it, and I can always go back and change things before I publish them. The internet, and computers in general, have made how we organize our thoughts more of a short-term process, than a plan-and then do- process. This makes for a much different end result.