What the Internet is doing to our brains

By Nicholas Carr

Main Points:

- The internet makes research very quick and efficient these days, saving us the tedium and the time-consuming process of reading through long articles and books

- However it is also diminishing and atrophying our ability to stay focused on a particular task

- The technologies that we use influence the way we think

- The author suggests that Google is trying to create artificial intelligence to replace the human mind

- He foresees a future where humans will simply become like machines and he is strongly opposed to such an idea

The Internet is No Substitute for the dying Newspaper Industry

By Chris Hedges

Main Points:

- The decline of the newspaper industry is about the rise of the “corporate state”

- Newspapers spend a lot of money to provide honest and objective news, whereas the internet provides biased news at little or no expense

- Newspapers have liability for the truthfulness of their facts whereas bloggers do not

- The demise of traditional media will be a demise to democracy, because the internet is browsed through an “ideological lense”

- Today’s media is all about making a profit and not about informing people what they need to know

- The author claims that our society is in a decline