Is "the internet" in the palm of our hands?

           There’s a book I began reading in my English Literature & Composition class. It’s titled “What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr. The internet is a digital landscape representative of every aspect of our world, but our "physical world" would be forever changed without it, can we change it? In Carr’s introduction, he states “The Shallows explains why we were mistaken about the net” our perceptions of the Internet and what we think it will do for us are not in alignment with what it actually does. He says “When it comes to the quality of our thoughts and judgments, the amount of information that communication medium supplies is less important than the way the medium presents the information and the way, in turn our brain takes it in.” The Internet as an interface for communication has a bigger impact on how we internalize information than the information itself. He says “It takes patience and concentration to evaluate new info, gather its accuracy, to weigh its relevance and worth, to put it into context - and the Internet by design subverts patience and concentration. When the brain is overloaded by stimuli ... peering into a network connected computer screen, attention splinters becoming more superficial and memory suffers. We become less reflective and more impulsive. Far from enhancing human intelligence, I argue the Internet degrades it.” The Internet is a vast and expensive rabbit hole of stimuli it degrades our concentration by inhibiting our ability to sit down with an idea and to interpret and evaluate it. So, the Internet is changing how we look back at and respond to what we consume, and not in a good way, it's taking what makes “human intelligence” special and stripping it down turning it into a simplistic, overly generalized way of thinking and engaging with what we consume.

              The Internet serves many purposes in my life; I can relate it to my experiences living in New York and how that has shaped my values. I took a 45-minute train from Brooklyn to Times Square to and from school every morning for the past four years of my life. Surrounded by pedestrians, drivers, bikers, tourists, friends, coworkers, businesses with blinding gigantic ads, my environment was like being in a room with hundreds of screens, each story distinct, playing out simultaneously. So, every day going to and from school I would wear my headphones, to distract myself from the distractions around me.

              What if the Internet is more than you think, it's not just a browser on your laptop, it's how we connect with our world, literally it's how you are reading this post right now. Using the Internet can feel like walking into a supermarket without a grocery list, buying a ton, and leaving without what you came for. Consider how much time you spend online, and how what you have consumed has shaped how you think. I do believe that once people claim a space and transform it into a community, it's no one's right to take away their access to this space. Carr points out the medium is the message, so how do we put people in control of the medium. It's not my place to decide whether Times Square should be less busy or have no tourism, but as a person who existed and used this space, I should have a say on how to improve it, everyone who exists there should. I might be in control of how I use it, but my right to be there, my safety while I'm there, the quality of my experience there (such as access to green spaces, third spaces, affordable food, clean streets, reliable transportation, etc.) is in the hands of other people. There's only so much an individual can control. It's now a part of my story. I carve out my space on the Internet too. But if we think about the internet as the access point to all things, shouldn’t everyone's voices be considered in how it's designed? And just because I learned from it, what if me adapting to Times Square life wasn't good for me? Just because it now holds memories, was where I hung out, worked, and went to school, it doesn’t mean it was a good environment for me. I made the best out of it because that’s what I do. My experience is not the only one, but going to school in Times Square impacted not just the experiences of myself but the experiences of everyone I went to school with and was surrounded by, it was one of the lenses in which we saw the world with. The message is shaped by the medium. You could argue this happens in all aspects of our lives, but since the Internet plays such a big role on my own, maybe on your own, shouldn't we question it more? What were the last things you used the internet for? What would our lives look like without the internet? 

             While I know that the internet is changing how we think, should we accept these changes as our new reality, continuing to adapt to them, or see it as a small part in human history, and fight against how it consumes our lives? Both my own experiences growing up with the internet, and Carr's experience living through the establishment of it inform how we think about it. Knowing a writer's "context" and your own "context" will help you interpret and evaluate your understanding of what you consume.