New addition my vocabulary: Cognitive surplus

Cognitive surplus is the free time Americans have on their hands to engage in collaborative activities. The article is stating that although the Internet can be incredibly helpful with retrieving information, it is also damaging our cognitive process of making knowledge thoughts our own. Shrink is making the claim that our attention span is shortened now a days and our patience is fried. This article defines literacy as the intentional reading and writing done by a person that involves depth and pure focus and patience. The term “literacy” in this article relates back heavily to the previous articles. The terms are relatively the same. The article involves lots of repetition throughout, but one important phrase that caught my eye was “free time”. Coming into the article, I thought it would fall under the same categories as the previous articles and in a way, it did. But, it also provided new background on how Americans perceived free time and what cognitive surplus really is. The repetition reinforces that idea by using it time and time again. Americans use their free time to scrape the surface of information, and give no time into depth and deep comprehension.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

1. The article written by Nicholas Carr claims that the overuse of the Internet in place of reading print is changing the way we think. In the past, we have taken the time to analyze, discuss and store information. Now, we spend our time memorizing quick bits of information from the Internet. The Internet provides us with everything we want, but with all of that it contributes to a large amount of distraction. The Internet continues to grow and it is slowly wiping out our interest to dive into a book or article. We are turning into machines searching for the website source to help us process information.

2. The websites we go to every day have made it much simpler for us to find information, so our tendency to search through a dictionary, newspaper or encyclopedia is diminishing. The Internet is slowly tearing us apart from deep thought, comprehension and reflection; we are becoming uninterested. The Internet is slowly rewiring our minds from thinking deep to quick memorization.

3. Literacy is defined almost the same thing, but there is a stronger danger in print, not speech. Literacy is defined as being able to think about and analyze print over a generous amount of time as opposed to skimming and article over a few minutes.

4/5. The Internet has changed the processes of thought and reading. We are prone to skip over the depth and the meaning now and just look at the surface structure. This pulls away from the depth of the writing and just brings one to conclude that the simple words are all that matter.

6/7. The author uses older changes in technology to demonstrate what people thought about changes similar to this and how they actually turned out such as the transition to mechanical clocks. He also brings up how changes in medium change the way we write and read just like how Nietzsche changed what he wrote when he changed how he wrote. And finally he brought up HAL and how it was more emotional, more human, than the actual humans because the actual humans lost the reasoning skills of deep thought. This evidence was very effective for the reason that it showed relevance throughout different situations and examples. It was different but it all helped prove a different part of the same point.

8. The overall answer to the “so what” question is that the Internet is frying our brains and it is leading us into a world of full technology where we are slowly losing our ability to find depth and true meaning. The more we rely on this technology, the more we begin to lose depth. 

Miley Movement

I have chosen Miley Cyrus's Twitter account to analyze for Unit 3. I have chosen her account due to the fact that she posts very, very often and keeps the world updated on a regular basis with not only her music and her career, but also her personal life. She posts lots of pictures and retweets and responds to her fans on a daily basis. I want to analyze her account and digger deeper into how social media and fame has affected her life. I've always loved her music and she definitely is going on a spree of being kind of wild, but I still love her haha. I am excited to analyze her account and see how her life collides with social media!

ps. I am sorry this is late! I did not know we had a blog post Monday. Thank you for taking it!!!

a world of social media

1. I believe that I am a very modest person on social media. I love to post pictures on Instagram and I love being social, but I don’t think I put too much out there. I never post anything about my own opinions or personal thoughts or anything because I don’t care to offend anyone via twitter. That is just silly and I think people get worked up about that stuff way too often. So, I would say that I basically am an easy going, low key person on social media. I never really post anything that isn’t just normal behavior on social networking.

2. After looking at five of my recent instagram photos, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are very accurate with who I am. My past five photos are with me and another person or my family. I love being with people, I love my social life and sometimes that has a big negative effect on my studies.. hehe. Maybe I should cut down the social life a little more.

3. Well, I believe in modesty on social media. I think that people should have the freedom to do whatever they want on the social media, if they choose to offend people then that is what they desire. I do not think that I should put my entire self out there; you have to have some kind of boundaries. I have never felt pressured to do what I do; it is what I want to do. I want to keep myself to myself and have some modesty ya know.

4. Yes, considering I don’t post anything that isn’t appropriate for all ages, I think I would be fine! My pictures are modest and my tweets are usually a response to someone or something and they are pretty just not exciting, haha I am pretty easy on the social media. I am a sucker for it, it is very distracting.