The Internet plays a pretty big part in our life whether you believe it or not. How it affects you as an individual varies from person to person, but overall it exerts some type of influence over you. In Nicholas Carr’s article “Hal and Me”, he believes that over the past decades the internet has involuntarily altered his thinking process in a way that he can’t get back no matter how much he tries. The Internet is something that, once acted upon, changes your whole perspective on life.
It consumes you. I feel it’s worse if you grew up without the Internet than being born into it. Your mind has already developed and your specific thinking process has already been established. Any outside force acting upon it is bound to change a few things around in there. The Internet alters daily lives in ways that some people don’t even see coming. They’re completely oblivious of the fact that our mind is changing every single day of Internet use. Not only has the Internet highly influenced my ever-changing thinking process, it has also affected the way I overlook my life.
If you don’t think the Internet has any effect on you whatsoever, you’re obviously delusional or have bad taste in judgment. I have been checking my Facebook and going on YouTube looking up the stupidest things almost every ten minutes as I’m writing this. I cannot focus primarily on just one thing anymore. There is a routine every time I try to: Facebook, work, procrastinate, work, eat, work, Facebook. I can never win. Being born into the Age of Advanced Technology does not help either.
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What is the meaning of life? Life's meaning does not need to be invented or deduced or conjectured anew in each age. It can be experienced if we begin to follow the bread crumbs dropped by those who have traveled the road before us. Countless spiritual pilgrims have felt the longings we all feel, have encountered the obstacles we encounter have devoted themselves to the truth we wish to do. It is ...
Each and every one of us has a specific thinking process that fits for our brain only. Each one of us processes information in our own way to understand what is being said. It just so happens that most of the information we process comes from the Internet. “The Net has become essential to their work, school, or social lives, and often to all three” (“Hal and Me” pg.17).
People depend on the Internet to provide the answers for everything and anything. How will the world function if the Internet just all of a sudden shut down? If there were no such thing as the Web, how much more developed would our minds be today?
The Internet is an all-purpose machine that contributes to some people’s social welfare. It also contributes to what occupation some go into. If all you do is sit on the computer and surf the Net for ways to upgrade your computer, you’re most likely going to go into an occupation that involves dealing with computer mechanics. Almost all occupations and careers nowadays involve computers in them. Either to sort out information, do research, or both. Either way the Internet is going to have some affect in your life. The more you use something, the more you become attached to it and the more it becomes a part of your daily life.
That goes for everything from relationships to computers. “Every evening, I carted it back home, where I used it to keep track of the family finances, write letters, play games…” (“Hal and Me” pg.21).
Since technology is expensive, people spend quite a lot of money on new products. Everyone wants the latest technology so therefore a good amount of money is spent to keep up with the flow. “To my wife’s dismay, I spent nearly our entire savings, some $2000, on one of Apple’s earliest Macintoshes” (“Hal and Me” pg.20).
It happens to everyone.
Most people who write books or do any other activity manually eventually wind up doing the same exact thing but digitally. For example, if you write articles just to express your opinion in the newspaper, you’re most likely going to open up a blog and express your opinion on there instead. I admit that the Internet is addicting in every way and form possible.
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There is just something about how the quickness of the Net automatically gets you to where you want to be. Many people enjoy how the Internet lets them say whatever they want whenever they want and they don’t have to worry about waiting for people to see it. “You’d type something up, code a few links, hit the Publish button, and your work would be out there, immediately, for all the world to see” (“Hal and Me” pg. 22).
You get used to that quickness and expect that everything is supposed to be like that. My patience began to slowly slip away from me. Now when I have to wait even thirty seconds for something I begin to lose it. I even hit and yell at the computer like that’s going to make it go any faster. Waiting for a slow computer is everyone’s arch enemy.
This essay is supposed to make you think. How do you think the Internet affects your daily life? In my opinion, The Internet shortens my attention span, makes me depend on it so that I can’t live without it, alters my thinking process involuntarily, and eventually makes you go bankrupt. Now the last one may have been a little extreme but a good amount of money does go into technology every day. All of those are aspects of our daily life. If the Internet alters every single one of them, especially your mind and thinking process, your life has been shaped by the Web without you even knowing it was happening.
Don’t you wonder how our brains would be if there were no such thing as the Internet? There would be no machine to automatically serve us the answers to every question we may have. There would be no machine to tell us what to think and how to think. Carr concludes his article with this one saying: “I missed my old brain” (“Hal and Me pg.24).
If I wasn’t born in the Age of Advanced Technology, I would too.
