Chapter 4 Response

The one sentence I agree with would have to be, "The lack of word separation, combined with the absence of word order conventions, placed an "extra cognitive burden" on ancient readers." I agree with this Carr on this one because of the one poem in class that I had to decipher. The poem had no spaces whatsoever and made it very hard for me to understand what it was saying. In addition to that, it was time-consuming. Even after deciphering the poem, I had a hard time understanding the feeling the poem was trying to give out. Thank goodness for the idea of adding spaces to writings. The sentence, "They had to train their brains to ignore everything else going around them.", I had to disagree with. I disagreed simply because obviously everybody is different and some people are just born naturally with good attention span and reading skills.

Chapter 4 Summary

Nicholas Carr, in "The Deepening Page," the fourth chapter in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, talks about the evolution of writing and books. He starts off by talking about the early creation of writing. Carr begins with the clay tablet and later moving on to the papyrus scrolls, wax tablet and finally the codex. The codex was basically the beginning of books. And from the book, Carr brings up silent reading and the scriptura continua. Back then when the book was first created, everybody had to read out loud and read without the use of spaces. Silent reading and spaces changed the way people read books. As the books grew popular, the letter press was invented by a German goldsmith named Johannes Getenberg. Getenberg's invention has changed the way we make, publish and read books dramatically. Its pretty interesting to me that the evolution started off when some people decided to write by using some natural resources. There would be no writing or books if no one ever tried writing.

Chapter 3 Summary

Nicholas Carr, in "Tools of the Mind," the third chapter in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Carr talks about the human brain and how it matures over time with the innovation of technology. He starts off by talking about clocks and maps they shape us. As clocks and maps were invented, we rely on them a lot. Carr describes them as "supplements" to our daily life. After reading the first few pages, I wondered how chaotic life would be if we didn't have clocks and maps to assist us. He also mentions that "our intellectual maturation as individuals, can be traced through the way we draw pictures, or maps, of our surroundings." The tools that we use has changed the way we think. Carr said that "Sometimes our tools do what we tell them to.Other times, we adapt ourselves to our tools' requirements."