The fast growth of different industries and the global economy led to the development of computer technology and electronic devices. Nowadays, the modern society cannot imagine their life without using of the Internet, social media and electronics. Today, the computer is an integral part of each family or business office. Definitely, all of these new technologies influence people behavior in some way. There are a lot of benefits that modern technologies brought to the current generation. Among them are the quick access to the global information and ability to be in touch with anyone in spite of the distance and time. However, there are also some negative effects that modern technology makes on a human being. Social media, the Internet and other electronic devices make the invisible influence on the ability of human to think and make people change their behavior.

In his article “Is Google making us stupid?” Nicholas Carr (2008) explains the concerns about the influence that computer technology makes on regular people. He does not argue that the Internet became a very helpful tool for him as a writer. From this point of view, the Internet is a real helper for many people all over the world. However, his first concern about the Internet is the decrease in the ability to concentrate the attention on the process of reading. He claims that not only he has a problem with reading, but also his friends and acquaintances. “I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle” (Carr). The use of the Internet changes people’s ability to concentrate their attention on the process of reading. Moreover, it makes this change so slow and invisible that it is difficult to indicate it. As a result, many people could think that they just lost their interest in reading books or large articles without any reason. 

The other concern that was indicated by the author of the article is difficulty to stay on one source of information. People who use the Internet go from one source to another and rarely return to the previous one. There was made a research by scholars from the University College of London. “They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited” (Carr). The Internet is changing the traditional way of reading. Thanks to the new technology, a deep reading is replaced by a cursory reading. Today, we take only the main idea from the online articles and do not pay much attention to the details. There are many internet articles that are shortened in its content. The same principle can be observed on television and newspapers. It can lead to the situation when people will be reading information in order to get just facts without further thinking about them. The final concern of Nicholas Carr is that Google, as the most used search engine, can collect information about us and distribute the adverts that are beneficial for large corporations or companies. “It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction” (Carr). Today, Google can provide us with information, and we will consider it as the only one credible source.

It is not difficult to agree with Nicholas Carr about all of his concerns. Definitely, the behavior of the young generation differs from old people who did not use new technologies very often. I agree that computer technology represents a progress of human development. However, it probably does not represent the development of our ability to think or concentrate our attention on one thing. At the time, where there was no Internet, I remember that I used to read more books that I do right now. It is interesting that access to the Internet gives us more opportunity to find a book that we need. Unfortunately, this abundance of choice decreased the desire to read. Mostly, I have the same problem as the author of the article. I cannot read long articles and prefer to read short ones in order to obtain more information. When, it comes the time to read the long ones, it is not possible to pay much attention to it. Blinking adverts, hyperlinks and other things that surround content distract my attention. When I open the Internet in order to find the information that I need, I can automatically click on heading that grabbed my attention. During the next fifteen minutes, I can go through several sites and completely forget what reason I switched on the computer for. As it was correctly noticed by the author of this article, it is not possible to concentrate on one topic. “The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration” (Carr). The main disadvantage of this is that many people do not notice these changes in their behavior or in the way of how they read.     

Based on my own experience, I can tell that the Internet with social media made a profound impact on my life. In some way, it changed my behavior in terms of schedule and free time. I noticed that instead of preparing food at home, I more often prefer to buy food from the shop in order to spend more time at the computer. I am constantly checking my emails and social account. The thoughts about it can distract my attention even when I am not using the Internet in a particular moment. The access to the Internet from mobile phone even increased this feeling. I agree with concerns of Nicholas Carr as I clearly understand that the decent majority of the young generation experiences the same problems with concentration on reading process. Sometimes, at one particular moment when I use the Internet, I understand that I was distracted from my specific topic by other information and read the articles that I did not intend to read.  Such problems with reading could be harmful for the future development of science or any research. In order to come up with a great solution or invention, it is necessary to spend a lot of time by focusing on one topic. However, it would be difficult for the future scientists to do this with such influence of the Internet on their brain and ability to concentrate attention.