Franco Leehive

Professor Miller

English 110

13 February 2025

The Devastation of Technology

Technology is damaging our brains. This is a common take on how technology is affecting our brain, but this take is not very accurate. Technology is negatively affecting our brain’s ability to do certain tasks and makes it more difficult for us to focus. Nicholas Carr is an acclaimed writer who has made several pieces relating to technology and how it affects us as people. Sherry Turkle is another writer and sociologist I will discuss in my essay. Sherry Turkle is an acclaimed writer and MIT professor of Social Studies of Science who has a PhD in Sociology from Harvard University. These two writers believe that technology has a very negative effect on how it interacts with our brain. I agree slightly with this statement. I feel as though technology can be used to help us greatly. Now, I also believe that technology can damage us negatively too. Technology can make us feel no empathy towards others while also damaging how we are able to focus on ourselves.

In sherry Turkle’s “The Empathy Diaries”, an essay that discusses how technology is negatively affecting how kids are feeling empathy, she argues that kids are becoming less able to feel empathy towards the peers and others. In an experience she had with a 7 year old student, the student talked about how she does not feel empathy or an emotion towards other students. Turkle describes this feeling the child felt as forever elsewhere, meaning that the child is not thinking about what is happening right where she is, but pushing off whatever is happening now and thinking about where else she could be, like her phone or other technology. I feel that this is not a very good way to live your life. If people are constantly feeling “forever elsewhere” then that means nothing in society will ever get done because nobody is thinking about the now and only thinking about what they could be doing instead of what they are currently doing. I find this to be prevalent especially when I am in class. I have this feeling of being forever elsewhere, lost in a fantasy world in my brain that is somewhere, anywhere else but here. Carr discusses a similar point in that, he discusses that the brain is now changing, not in a good way but it is changing. He says that it is negatively impacting the way that we are able to read texts in depth.