Blog post #1

“Hal and Me” by Nicholas Carr explores the transitioning of technology and the feelings of the generations that experienced the transition of paper to desktop. Carr’s project in this literature was to display that essentially that technology makes certain things obsolete and changes people’s behaviors along with the way that they think. He does this by taking a character who was born in 1959 and giving insight to the elapsed time in his life and the character explains how technology has changed his life. He gets his point across by explaining how in the beginning people were not as reliant on computers and still used a pen and paper, books, and even libraries but as time progressed they became outdated simply because technology, specifically the computer made a way to do these things more efficiently. Soon Carr uses the argument of articles vs. books in today’s society to display how technology alters and affects people’s brains and how they think about the world. He explains how technology becomes an addiction; “rot. But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it — and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check e-mail, click links,do some Googling. I wanted to be connected” (16). This urge to be connected displays that essentially Carr thinks of the ever changing of technology as an addiction and in a negative light due to the fact that it create a fear of missing out and a constant need to be connected.

“The Rise of the Centaurs” by Clive Thompson he uses chess to display how technology innovates and improves the world. He does this specifically when he talks about a new form of intellect that we have from computers; “ (1) a chess grandmaster was good;(2) a chess grandmaster playing with a laptop was better. But even that laptop-equipped grand master could be beaten by (3) relative newbies, if the amateurs were extremely skilled at integrating machine assistance” (5). By using this example Thompson is displaying the enhancements that technology has on the world. He believes when man and computer work together they combine to create a superpower in a sense. Computers and other technology work as a resource to assist humans in acquiring a desirable outcome and make life easier and more efficient. He argues that this connection is positive as opposed to detrimental and allows for mental expansion. As technology keeps updating itself and continuing to advance it can only better peoples minds and expands their ideas and thinking processes.