High-Tech Trash

E-waste is taking over our planet. Save us! Technology is ruining our world, and we need to start doing something about it. Practically every day new technology such as computers, televisions, and cell phones are put on the market, and equally as many old technological products are thrown into our trash cans, and land fills. The toxins from these items seeps into the ground, and harms the soil.

GERMS ARE EVERYWHERE

Antibacterial soap is everywhere. it has invaded our schools, malls, cars, and purses. It can be found in a variety of scents, and it comes in small pocket size bottles, or maybe available in tall plastic dispensers located in easily accessible places for highly trafficked and public areas. Even more so ever since the threat of a swine flu epidemic the fast drying, no water required germ killer has become a clean freaks best friend.
Antibacterial soaps all claim to kill about 99% of germs and use commercials to show it. Graphs are a common demonstration of the germs before and after the use of their product. These portable size small containers of bacterial killing magic use the scare tactics of illnesses that are widely spreading. In today's economy, no one can afford to be home sick from work.
Clean, healthy, safe, germ free. These are all words describing antibacterial soap. The public buys into these words because they're scared of the flu plague affecting their families.
In our culture, we have become very germ conscious. Everything has the potential to be deathly and everything we come into contact with is dirty. Americans have become dependent on quick fixes like dry soap to keep us healthy fast.

Toulmin Model- Nicholas Carr

A point of a cursor, the click of the mouse, and boom- everything you could ever imagine: every answer to any question you could possibly have is at your finger tips in an instant. How has this change affected our culture? In Nicholas Carr's article, Is Google making Us Stupid?, he evaluates some of the negative effects the internet might be having on our brains. "What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation." Carr reflects on how the World Wide Web might be changing the way people think and find information. Internet might make access to information easy, however it also might allow its users to become lazy and shorten our attention spans. "The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing." the author uses his friends experiences to discuss our slowly dwindeling attention spans. The capability of having instant gratification makes users become greedy, and in our fast paced world we have become to demand everything to be available as fast as possible from our food to finding a quote in a book. "They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site." The article talks about how researchers have reverted to a form of "skimming" versus reading for what they're looking for. Nothing is ever fast enough, up to date enough, or short enough for our techno-centric world.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The first thing I noticed about this article by Nicholas Carr was the illustration that was done by Guy Billout. The police car says "Internet Patrol" on the back of it and the police officer is writing a man, not in a car, a ticket while they stand next to a sign for the speed allowed. This implies that the man was using the Internet faster then allowed, or faster then thought safe. Does that mean the speed of the Internet can be considered unsafe?

The reference to the movie "A Space Oddessy" appropriately relates the supercomputer in the film, Hal, to the malfunctioning that may occur in today's technology. The description of the man who's mind is changing is due to the Internet, and is talking about how his mind can no longer stay focused on a slow paced book when today we are used to computers feeding our minds at incredible speeds. Internet has allowed our minds to change the way we think, and the way we access information, no longer through books, but now in seconds via Google. Come to think about that, I used to read much more when I was younger. I always equate that change with the fact that I am much more busy with school work and work in general but maybe it also has to do with the fact that I can much more quickly just go read something online, or have interaction over the computer. Something I really notice in the way I read, is how I feel about lengthy articles and posts. I'd prefer a summary. I know a lot of people who use www.sparknotes.com in order to avoid reading long books. Sparknotes is a tool of the Internet to avoid taking the time to read, its knowledge- but faster.

I like the word "power-browse", it really describes how we read things online differently, traveling from link to link and using hypertext to quickly go from site to site searching for the paragraph or small quote we will end up using instead of thoroughly inspecting every word. The median we use for language definitely changes how we write and what we are writing. In the article Carr takes note of a writer who's writing changed after his switch from pen and paper to the type writer. In our WSC 001 class, we talked about this all the time, including our construction paper crayon activity. This activity showed us that for the most part what you are writing on can break up and change how you approach the same topic.

The clock controls every ones lives every day. Even while writing this, I have probably checked the time on my computer, cell phone, and watch more than 100 times today. I know that I am obsessed with time. We base our entire daily routine on the time of day. This dependence is similar to the dependence on the Internet because it changed the way we think about things, and what is important. Time also effects what we want to read. Even the New York Times changed it's layout to include shorter clips of stories so that when the consumer is in a hurry they can get a quick overview of the story. Our attention spans are just so short that no one wants to take the time to read more then necessary to figure out what is going on in the world.

Google uses its search engines to run experiments everyday, testing to find out how and what people take from the information they are looking for on the Internet. In Google's attempt to be a perfect search engine they stated that their mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Allowing perfect access in the most convenient and quickest way possible. Carr describes our minds as "hyperactive" and I think that describes how the Internet has changed our minds the most.

hy⋅per⋅ac⋅tive 
–adjective
1.unusually or abnormally active:

Compared to the slower paced thoughtful minds of our ancestors, our minds today move at an unusually fast pace where we cant meditate for too long on any one subject, without becoming distracted. Carr is worried that as the Internet continues to make life easier, our minds and intelligence will slowly turn to completely dependent on technology.