Nicholas Carr

I cannot relate to Nicholas Carr when he says that he is having a harder time focusing on long articles and keeping his attention on something for a lengthy period of time because I have always had that problem. He said “I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.” I disagree with him on the idea that the internet is making us more scatterbrained than we were before.

Carr says “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.” But for me the internet has made it easier for me to focus on what I am reading because I can stay in one place and get all the information I need to complete the task at hand. If I don’t understand a word or an idea I can look it up on a search engine. I don’t have to get up and go find a book and then search in the book to figure it out. And usually by the time I do find that book I have already forgotten what I was looking up.

By staying in one place I have fewer distractions which make it easier for me to stay on the topic at hand. It makes it more efficient and less time consuming which also helps keep me focused, knowing that if I need to find something I can do it, do it fast, and do it right, where if I was at a library it would take me a long time to find what I needed, I would get distracted by the other books and want to read them, and when I did get the book I need, all the other information in it would distract from what I was originally doing, taking more of my focus away as well.

When I went to the library to write a paper on ethical absolutes and moral relativism I went knowing what I wanted to find, I had the call numbers, so all I had to do was go to the right stack and grab the book, but the problem was that when I got there, there were so many other books that looked interesting that I had to grab them too. So by the time I was done with getting the books I came for I ended up with twice as many books, which is all good but when you are on a deadline and trying to get the job done that causes problems and adds to the already constrained time. And because I got so many books I wasn’t able to finish all of them, only parts of them because I had to move on to the next class project.

I think that libraries are great in that you can get what you need and find all sorts of other things that interest you but you would never have known about, but it also causes you to not get as much done as you could with the internet. There is a time and place for internet research versus library research. It comes down to what works best for the individual. I work better having as few distractions as possible, which is why I stick to the internet, the single stop place. Carr would disagree with me, but I think that if he had grown up with the internet maybe he wouldn’t feel so against it.