Blog Post 1

Nicholas Carr’s chapter “Hal and Me”, from The Shallows, delves into how the arrival of Net changed how we read as a whole. Before the Net was developed, reading was different. Instead of quickly searching for texts online, skimming through searching for ideas prevalent to the reader and moving on to the next source, people would read their texts; books and sources throughout. Regardless of this, the Net has become a necessity, people having to make trade-offs that come with convenience of material readily available. Our style of life, let alone style of reading has dramatically changed. Similarly, in Clive Thompson’s “Smarter Than You Think”, Thompson focuses on the evolution of chess and how computers have played a controversial role, while “furthering” the sport if you will. Chess was once a sport where a grand master could not beat a supercomputer, IBM’s Deep Blue. With the expansion of the sport and changing times however, it has become a sport where two people, amatuers with all do respect, and a few computers can do what a grand master could not. Bring down a supercomputer. It has also become a sport where one can become a grand master before they are a teenager.

Keywords used by Carr are chipping away, the way I think has changed, and skilled hunter. Keywords used by Thompson are changes, refine, and infinite memory.

While the internet is a great source of material, it has to be used in the right manner. Carr writes, “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” This can have two main takeaways. One which Carr discussed is that in the age of the Net we tend to skim readings only looking for what we need and going onto the next source when we either cannot find what we are looking for or we need to find more. Another idea that was not mentioned but is very relevant is it is not healthy to look at a computer screen for that much every day. Peoples eyes start to glaze over and after enough reading most times they do not fully comprehend what they have just read and need to go over it and read it a second time. It is both efficient in convenience but inefficient in efficiency. Something similar can be said for what Thompson wrote about. The internet, access to chess software and computers can be both good and bad for the sport. One instance of it being bad can be found when Thompson writes “During tense moments, he [Christoph Natsidis] kept vanishing for long bathroom visits; the referee, suspicious, discovered Natsidis entering moves into a piece of chess software on his smartphone.” He later compared it to PED scandals in sports, causing more harm than good and giving a reason for it not to be allowed. Conversely, computers are a great source of information, “computers took over the library’s role and bested it.” Computers allowed for people to try new things against computer software that would have taken many human vs. human mathes to figure out and perfect.