Strategically Communicating

While The Shallows plumbs the depths of the Internet’s effects on our brains from an intellectual standpoint, Carr’s analysis gives rise to the need for a secondary analysis of the way our Internet-wired brains impact our human relationships. He touches on the emotional and sociopsychological effects intermittently throughout the book, but I noticed myself longing for greater detail concerning how the Internet’s eclipse of direct human interaction has changed us as social creatures.

In an article called “Five Emotions Invented By the Internet,” Thought Catalog blogger Leigh Alexander lists five distinctive emotions spurred by web-based social interactions. Each was uncomfortably familiar, particularly the first: “A vague and gnawing pang of anxiety centered around an IM window that has lulled.” Although the low-commitment conversations generally held via IM are shallow and likely arbitrary, our fear of being dismissed from the attention of another Internet user, without clear cause, is manifested in this newly-hatched emotion. We feel at once vaguely hurt by and ambivalent towards this possibility of dismissal.

With emotions such as these in mind, one wonders how we are evolving in relation to one another. Face-to-face conversations, for example, seem to generate increasing levels of anxiety, but as Carr points out, oral history and human connection were once the basis of our information exchange system – not to mention our society.

How do the Internet and web-based social interactions affect our emotional and interpersonal health? 

The Shadows (Carr, 2010) talks about how Google’s chief criterion in ranking search engine results (the quality of links coming into a site) is no longer its only ranking indicator. It’s now one of at least two hundred carefully guarded signals that Google monitors, one being freshness.

Google is incented to reduce the cost of the Internet and expand its use, while increasing its share of profits from its complementary businesses like Google Ads, online commerce and local reviews.

A New York Times article from Nov. 4, 2012, talks about Nextag, a comparison-shopping site, whose business quite literally relies on Google but in other ways is a competitor. With more than 60 percent of its revenues dependent on Google searches, the company was understandably upset when traffic began falling dramatically. After trying every geeky thing they could imagine to determine how they got on the wrong side of Google’s analytics, the company heavily invested in Google’s paid search ads. “We had to,” says their chief executive, “We’re living in Google’s world.”

This coincides with a government inquiry into Google that could result in an antitrust suit filed by the Federal Trade Commission. It’s OK to build a large corporate behemoth (Google dominates more than 67 percent of all online searches) but it’s another thing to stifle competition.

Question: Do you think Google’s motivation for continually tweaking its search results algorithm is purely to improve service or does Google also use it to crush possible competitors?

Sometimes I wonder if media is healthy for me. I do have the tendency to get hooked on TV show, checking my emails, updating my Facebook and more. Though I have only been on Facebook for a year, I have become addicted like most of us. I want people to like what I post and I love catching up on what my friends are doing. I have a busy life. I go to school full time, I work full time and I volunteer to my food co-op and at KBOO community radio station. Thankfully, I have my smart phone which helps me stay updated and allows me to listen to my favorite show, Democracy Now! But when do I reflect, contemplate, listen?

I am trying to become a creator of media. I have to keep updated on new multimedia technology and know what others in the field are doing. Do I really? Is watching, reading and listening to what other people do really a source of inspiration or am I simply going to end up coping something that has already be done? Could contemplating nature, reflecting of what makes me happy and devoting more time to meditation be more beneficial to my health, sanity and journalistic career? I like to think so. Carr convinced me! Since reading his book I have done some soul searching and have realized that my future with media had to be one of deep thinking, silence, time and compassion.

Can you create media content but not be connected to? Can you be a journalist without having access to the internet, TV or books?

As I read the first six chapters of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, I was, of course, concerned about the degradation of the human mind that he posits. And, I can support his arguments about shrinking attention span and the way in which we bounce from one half-finished article to another, with many examples from my own life. For example, as I sit down to write this blog post I am fending off the urge to bounce around from news sites to facebook to clothing store websites.

But, as someone who has recently spent a great deal of time looking for a job, I also wonder if this incessant multi-tasking offers any sort of benefit or marketable skill. Multi-tasking in the traditional sense is certainly a desirable skill, and so I wonder, is there any way in which how our brains appear to be becoming addicted to constantly seeking new information and juggling lots of information at a time, can help us in the work place? Is hyper-multi-tasking a marketable skill? Similarly, for the journalists in this class, when we cover stories, there are often a great number of factors to keep track of, is it possible that the ways in which our dependence on the internet has trained our brains to constantly seek and juggle new information can help us?

I must say I was very relieved that we were assigned to read a book for our homework! If the 10-year-old me were here today, she would be astonished. As a child, I dreaded being assigned a book for homework. I got bored and distracted easily when I tried to read books as a child. As I grew up, I found myself much happier in the visually stimulating world of the Internet. Today however, I am much more distracted than I ever was. I can’t focus when reading online and I would much rather read a book for a homework assignment than suffer through an online article.

I have never had the patience or acute attention to read a book for a long period of time, so why was I so eager to try reading a book again? As Carr points out, we don’t really share a relationship with the computer screen, like we do with a printed book. “The bond between the book reader and the book writer has always been a tightly symbiotic one, a means of intellectual and artistic fertilization” (Carr, 74). For me, it has always been harder to absorb material from an online article than a printed article.

In “The Shallows,” Steve Johnson worries that the immersion into the ideas of the author in books will be compromised.

With reading occurring more and more on the Internet, are the ways in which we read print books changing as well?

While reading the first six chapters of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, I couldn’t stop finding parallels to my own media consumption habits. But even before reading this book I started wondering if this is a common phenomenon among digital natives. The changes of the plasticity of our brain as well as how our synapses fire and wire together due to the media we consume, might after all be only one site of the story. The “socially constructed” side of media use might just be as important for our media literacy.

Whenever a revolutionary technology comes around, we first have to learn its perks and features, having to learn how to effectively utilize it, and coming up with proper media etiquette. Have you ever wondered how the first telephone conversations have sounded like at the time of Graham Bell? They probably sounded just as formal as written letters, driving Bell laboratories to launch a giant telephone etiquette campaign. This process still takes place today. Who has not spent some time wondering about Do’s and Don’ts in social networks or how inefficient e-mails can be for problem-solving? Any particular media might just become what we make out of it.

What impact does this have on our knowledge of media effects? Can we even distinguish between the nature of media and its socially constructed use?