Final Blog: The Shallows--The Post-American World

The book I read was The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. I am commenting on Ashley Cummings' blog for her book, The Post-American World. It doesn't seem like these two books have a lot of connections, but there are some in the beginning of the book, which she writes about in her blog. The quote Ashley used is saying that there is so much growth in our world now with technology, economics, and politics and it can be good and bad. I am going to stick with the technology part because that connects to my book the most. She quotes that "it is raising a series of complex and potentially lethal dilemmas" (Zakaria 27). That is something that the author of my book Nicholas Carr, would probably agree with. He believes that the Internet is changing us and our brains in mostly negative ways. Both of these books discuss how technology is greatly advancing. It's good because everything is now faster and easier and we can do anything we need to do online, and most Americans now find that they cant live without it. Its bad because were dependent on it and now were losing the importance of memorization, books are also losing their value and its only going to get worse...and better at the same time. Also, I like how she talks about challenging the status quo, and changing it because thats what we have been talking about in class all semester. I feel like in my book, the author wants us to challenge the status quo as well and maybe try to cut down on our use of the internet and television. He wants to bring back the power of the book, as opposed to The Post-American World, where they need to alter the status quo to compete with the new global powers we will soon have.