Mitchell Dickerson
Comp II
Ms. Foster
Week 2 Analysis

Does the Internet Make You Smarter/Dumber?

Digital media have made the creation and sharing of text, sound, and pictures cheap and global. But most people making use of it produce nothing more than an endless stream of mediocrity, which has led to alarmed predictions of incipient intellectual collapse.
Of course, that's what always happens with an increase in access to media. As Gutenberg's press spread through Europe, it came with a flood of contemporary literature, most of it mediocre.
But the eventual result was new norms caused by abundant literature -- novels, newspapers, scientific journals, and the separation of fiction and non-fiction, all of which had the effect of increasing, rather than decreasing, the intellectual range of society.
Clay Shirky, writing in The Wall Street Journal:
"We are living through a similar explosion of publishing capability today ... Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years ... Similarly, open source software, created without managerial control of the workers or ownership of the product, has been critical to the spread of the Web."
Reading is not a natural act; neither is using a computer. Literate societies invest extraordinary resources training children to read. Now is the time to determine what response should shape the use of digital tools.

Claim: Does the internet make you smarter? I believe that it does there is so much information out there at your fingertips. You are able to find all the information that you need for any subject that you are working on whether it is an opinion or fact. It also make research much easier when you can find information in matter of seconds, but don’t get me wrong the old way by looking through books, magazines and newspaper article are just as affective.
Warrant: In Clay Shirky articular warrants or assumes that reading books gave you the opportunity to create or consume media. I believe this to be true. We started with books and newspapers as a source of information. It help us to know what was going on in the world. It also gave us the opportunity to form our own opinions and respond the writings that was published. Let us look at Gutenberg’s press did for the world. It spread through Europe so quick with the printing and translation of the bible. The bible then spread to the rest of the world. To be honest though Clay Shirky did not let you know that if the internet made you smarter or dumber.
Support/Grounds:
1. 4 ways the internet is making kids smarter – Edudemic.com
2. The internet can make you smarter experts say- CNET
3. The internet will make will make you smarter Claims study- Fox News
Qualifiers: As I read the article I found no words in the article that could be considered qualifiers that would answer that question does the internet make you smarter. He never really talked about the internet a mention of it was about it.
Rebuttal:
Nicholas Carr uses more proven statistics and psychological