The following is in response to the work of two authors: Eli Paiser and Nicholas Carr.

In recent discussions of the Internet, a controversial issue has been whether or not the media is impacting our day-to-day lifestyles. Nicholas Carr’s argument that “the faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements" (Nicholas Carr) is supported by Eli Paiser’s research. Carr’s claim was noticed in Paiser’s study regarding the Google search of “Egypt.” The two authors celebrate the fact that our internet searches leave clues as to what people want to see, when they want to see it, and where they want to see it. I can completely relate to the notion that our internet is personalized. When I am at UMD and scroll down to the notification page of my iPhone, it automatically tells me the weather in my location and the time it would take for me to drive home. As I am reading ENGL101 articles, the purses I looked at on Nordstrom.com three weeks ago engulf every corner of my screen, begging to be purchased. Carr proposed the idea that the ad creators are deliberately distracting us: “It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.” (Carr) Even though Carr and Paiser present their values from different perspectives, they are both communicating that we are constantly being tracked and our attention is constantly being diverted.

Both Paiser’s Ted Talk and Carr’s article raised questions that forced me to contemplate what the future holds. How much worse can our laziness due to the Internet get? Will there be a day in which all verbal communication ceases to exist? Paiser seems optimistic that those who created the web can improve it. He ends his Ted Talk addressing those who have helped build the web and saying that "we really need [them] to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility.” (Eli Paiser) This may be one solution, but is using the web to fix the web a viable solution? Paiser’s request to web creators somewhat contributes to Carr’s message that we are developing a uniform and robotic mindset. It is almost as if we are all machines that need to be rewired with more outside life, but that “public life” is given to us behind a screen.