a. I somewhat disagree with the article that I was assigned
b. I’m in the middle on this topic. I think that the internet can make you smarter because when you look things up on google for example, you’re reading and learning information based on questions that you have. However, I think that social media does definitely make you dumber because the algorithms on social media sites can lead you down a path of extreme bias by pandering to the things you are already interested in based off of websites and other apps you have visited and will mostly only show you the things that you want to see. This makes it a lot harder to learn different perspectives.
c. The printing press is a good example of how the internet can make you smarter because, like print, the internet allows us to access a wide variety of texts, and reading makes you smarter. “Novels, newspapers, scientific journals, the separation of fiction and non-fiction, all of these innovations were created during the collapse of the scribal system, and all had the effect of increasing, rather than decreasing, the intellectual range and output of society (quote is referring to Print).”
The best example of the the internet scattering your mind is Tik Tok. On Tik Tok, you are endlessly scrolling through very short videos (mostly) which makes it so that you only have to pay attention to one thing for a short period of time, and then switch to something completely different, which I think is bad. I deleted it in the summer and immediately noticed an increase in my attention span. “Whereas the internet scatters our attention, the book focuses it. Unlike the screen, the page promotes contemplativeness.”
Overall, I think the internet makes you dumber mostly because of the constant attention shifting which makes your attention span shorter and I think that having a longer attention span is key to being able to have a high cognitive ability.
