Internet Is Changing Our Way of Thinking Research Paper

INTERNET IS CHANGING OUR WAY OF THINKING
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Internet Is Changing Our Way of Thinking
IntroductionTechnology has capsized human existence upside down. Currently, digital gadgets and social media have occupied a huge legroom in our lives capturing a wider span of our attention than never before. The Internet has revolutionized communication channels and the way people communicate. The Internet has changed almost every facet of life; the way we do shopping, sharing good moments with other people, sharing pictures, booking travel tickets, applying for a job and many other duties. The internet has facilitated the spread of news and today one does not only have to watch a television set to get updated rather follow what is happening right from the handset in hand. It is for these reasons that the human reliance on the internet has become too much to the extent that the internet itself has changed the way we think and the social connections with one another. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate how humans currently think and in future. It shall also seek to unravel ways in which internet has and is affecting our lives.
How the Internet is Changing Our Brains
The most affected part of the body by internet is the brain. This is because the internet first distracts the mind; people currently have little information at the fingerprints due to disruption and distraction of the computers (Hassan, 2014, p 60). People believe that every solution to every problem exists on the internet and therefore no need of burdening the brain to remember so many thinks. According to brain scientists and more precisely psychologists, contemplates that interruptions have a great impact on how human brain thinks. The Internet becomes the source of new stimuli throughout the day, and it makes it difficult for the brain to sustain attention or think about a given scenario for an extended period. Deep thinking on important matters of life is reduced (Hassan, 2014, p 63.).
The Internet affects the memory of the brain. Human brain scientists say that for a long term memory to be established, information must be moved from the conscious brain (working memory) into a long term memory site. This process requires a memory consolidation that relies on the attentiveness of an individual. It also requires that a person rehearses the piece of information in the mind so as to develop and enhance strong memory for that particular information and wire with other important information that the brain deems important for future retrieval (Hassan, 2014,p 65.). However, the internet is constantly distracting this process by introducing new information within short spans of time making the information in the conscious memory to be prematurely pushed to long term memory before it has been rehearsed enough for long term memory (Hassan, 2014, p 67). It, therefore, follows that such information will not be remembered for a long time no matter how vital it was. This has been confirmed through studies. Columbia University studied long-term memory development in human beings during this error of internet and found out that many people are less likely to be bothered forming a long-term memory when the same information can easily be found online from their mobile phones (Giedd, 2012, p 101).
Neuroscientists have studied the human mind, and they found that the brain is a malleable plastic. This means that the brain is very adaptive of what is in the environment. Social media forms part of the physical environment that has the potential to alter the brain and make it adapt to. The brain realizes that there are external hard disks in which the information is stored and therefore has to keep less information (Giedd, 2012, p 102). It then adapts to that scenario by shrinking its capacity to less information that a human still stores in the brain. This then reduces the capacity for thinking, and people end up having very little thinking capacity even to digest obvious mathematics (Giedd, 2012, p 103). For example, use of computers in mathematical calculations has made it difficult for many young people to solve a simple math like 7*8. Many cannot answer this sum off-head because of the shrinkage of the brain and thus making humans stupid.
Additionally, the internet leads to loss of cognitive control. Technology impairs our minds and determines what an individual thinks about. According to Hassan (2014), the more people hang on to the internet and the constant information emanating from it, the more less capable of figuring out what is necessary and what an individual should concentrate on. The Internet makes people concentrate more on what is new and not what is important (Wallace, 2015, p 81). This can be explaining the view of how people are interested in what is trending from day to day on Twitter. Whether what trends is important or not, it has the attention of the masses and sometimes makes people follow even things that do not make sense simply because the internet has stupefied the cognitive control (Wallace, 2015, p 83).
Internet surfing chips away the brain's capacity for contemplation and concentration. Google presents information in a more attractive way with hyperlinks that lead to short summaries of the whole article and sometimes summarizing information in the form of short videos and other graphics (Maurer, 2015, p 58). These summaries of information have a significant impact on the way people concentrate; the graphics stimulate concentration. But what happens when one turns to an article written in prose form in a book, for example? Research shows that when people surf the internet for long periods of time, their concentration is reduced and would find it boring to read a book for a few minutes. The Internet shapes the way of thought and in the process cuts out the way of contemplating (Carr, 2015, p 355).
How the Internet Affects Our Social Life
Use of social media has both positive and negative impacts on the human social life. The Internet creates more opportunities for people to interact virtually. Online dating is a typical example of how the internet is facilitating interaction for people from different places who can end up in intimate relationships (Bolton, et al., 2013, p 245). In the current society, especially Western societies, life has become more individuated brought about by segmented social set ups. The Internet offers a solution this by bridging the gap between those social set ups as t...