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 written several pieces relating to technology and how it affects us as people such as the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, a narrative on how the internet has negative effects on how we operate in the world. 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 and a writer of many articles such as “The Empathy Diaries”, a narrative on how technology is destroying our empathy. These two writers believe that technology has a very negative effect on how it interacts with our brains. I believe technology has both positive and negative effects, but its impacts on empathy and focus are particularly concerning. Technology can be great in practically just making our lives easier and making tasks take less time, but it can also lead to harsh negatives as kids now have less empathy towards others and do not have high emotional intelligence.

Empathy is the driving force between human connections. If kids do not have this level of empathy anymore, they will not be able to function in the real world. 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 can 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.

Technology also damages the way we think in depth about our ideas. Now, when we are reading articles or trying to focus on our ideas, our ability to concentrate on that is being impeded by the Net and how it operates. Carr says that the Net “seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” (2). What he is saying is that as we interact in conversation with the Net and how it operates, our brain is trying to analyze and read things the same way it is being distributed to us. This overcompensation of the brain is then causing us to not be able to concentrate on all the information and it makes us not able to think about things in depth. I think that this is a very important point to make because our brains are not wired to take in all this information and spit it out just as fast. Our brains need time to think in silence and process information but, when we are being shown so much information at one time, we overcompensate, and we can’t see everything we were looking for. Turkle agrees with this sentiment when she talks about how conversation is disrupted by technology, saying “With people, things go best if you pay close attention and know how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Real people demand responses to what they are feeling. And not just any response” (346). Turkle, in this quote, is saying that communicating with a person requires you to give responses that are for how they are feeling and not just on their issues. When communicating with a piece of technology, you can give any response to it because it does not require a response based on how it feels. After all, it does not. This means that talking with technology makes us think superficially and does not require us to use our brains when talking. Just as Carr says about how our “concentration and contemplation” is being damaged, Turkle says that communication with technology damages our ability to feel emotion towards others and makes us less emotionally intelligent.

The reality is that technology is damaging our mental abilities to feel emotional connection and empathy towards others. While technology offers incredible benefits, we must remain vigilant about its influence on empathy, focus, and emotional intelligence to ensure a balanced and thoughtful society. Turkle argues that technology is diminishing our children’s empathy capacity, and this is destroying connections with others. Carr supports this by stating how the internet and technology have reshaped our brains and programmed them to act as the internet acts. If technology keeps this trend of controlling how we act and how our brains are programmed, then we risk losing the most fundamental human qualities we possess, like our emotional intelligence. Technology is a vital part of our human society, and it would be very difficult to live without it, but we need to change something otherwise future generations will not experience the same joys we have today.