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 brains, 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 brains. 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 their peers and others. In an experience a principal had with a 7 year old student who was sent there because she was excluding another from playing with them, the student talked about how she does not feel empathy or emotion toward other students.

[The seventh grader] was almost robotic in her response. She said, ‘I don’t have feelings about this.’ She couldn’t read the signals that the other student was hurt. These kids aren’t cruel. But they are not emotionally developed. Twelve year olds play on the playground like eight year olds would play. They don’t seem able to put themselves in the place of other children. They say to other students: ‘You can’t play with us.’ They are not developing that way of relating to where they listen and learn how to look at each other and hear each other. (Turkle 345)

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 that I’d rather be than in the moment. 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. He realizes in his article that the brain is now trying to take in information as The Net is giving it out. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (Carr 2). Carr, in this quote, is comparing how he analyzes data that he reads to exploring the ocean. He says that he used to be able to fully immerse himself into data before the net just as a scuba diver fully emerged in the ocean, seeing all the wonders of the ocean. He now says that he barely even scratches the surface of the information that he is reading just as a jet ski only hits the surface of the water and this is due to how his brain is changing. His brain has now changed to analyze information as The Net is giving it out. This comes with a cutback because our brains are not bringing in all the information present anymore. I like this simile because it paints a picture of how the information is being only brushed over. I feel that I can apply this to my readings because I find it difficult to be able to analyze all the data that is coming at me with one article and I cannot get it all in my brain.