Has technology inhibited us from effectively engaging in some of the most essential components that make us human? Authors, Sherry Turkle and Nicholas Carr both address technology’s significant role in their writing pieces that they’ve composed. Both seek to demonstrate how it may be altering our performance on daily tasks based on the lack of attention we’ve developed from technology usage. “The Empathy Diaries,” written by Turkle, focuses on how technology poses a barrier from human conversation and our ability to empathize appropriately. Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid” is based on a similar idea and how technology is negatively affecting humans and our ability to focus and deep thinking skills. It can be determined that the presence of technology has prevented humans from relying on the individual comprehension and the influence of others in order to fulfill ourselves and our needs, but rather we revert to technology which is taking away from our skills we once had.

As technology has evolved, it has imposed us with a form of gravitational pull towards it, ultimately drawing our attention away from the task presented in front of us. One particular factor that technology has set us apart from is being fully engaged with face to face conversations which are so vital for humans to have these interactions. In “The Empathy Diaries,” Turkle suggests, “Similarly, we now rarely give each other our full attention, but every once in a while we do. We forget how unusual this has become, that many young people are growing up without ever having experienced unbroken conversations either at the dinner table or when they take a walk with parents or friends” (351). Turkle recognizes that phones are hindering our ability to devote all of our focus to those who we are having a conversation with based on these devices representing the primary distraction. When it comes to Carr and his text, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” instead of viewing technology as a source that inhibits our focus revolving around in-person communication, he analyzes how it eats away at our individual capacity of focusing as a form of deep thinking. “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do… For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes” (1-2). It appears Carr acknowledges that technology usage is more efficient and gives us answers instantly. Therefore, when it comes to reading long texts, we lose the engagement since we know we have another resource that can easily do the work for us. While I agree with Turkle’s perspective that technology is acting as an obstacle from fully dedicating our focus to the present connection we are forming with others. I also align with Carr’s view on how technology is damaging our ability to focus in circumstances involving in depth reading. Both authors’ perspectives are what I believe to be relevant in terms of technology’s impact on human beings. I think it is evident that when we are constantly surrounded by our phones, we tend to subconsciously focus on it and what is going on in the digital world, which takes away from our full potential to invest in the in-person interactions taking place before us. The internet displays itself as an efficient tool to gain any kind of information within seconds as well. Resulting  in humans turning to this easy solution to obtain the answers, so when faced with a lengthy piece of writing we do not have the patience nor attention span to read through it searching for what we need. As technology has become so frequently used in our daily lives, it is impacting our attention spans, causing us to be less devoted to the task at hand when it comes to any social settings or learning through reading textual content.

Technology portrays itself as a source that revolves around efficiency, in which this effective timeliness consumes us, weakening our intellectual capabilities in a variety of ways, such as empathy and memory consolidation. Turkle is primarily concerned with how the amount of technology usage that one consumes puts our empathizing ability at risk during conversation with peers. Contained in Turkle’s text she emphasizes this idea through an example of a young generation’s exposure to digital technology, “As the Holbrooke middle schoolers began to spend more time texting, they lost practice in face-to-face talk. That means lost practice in the empathic arts – learning to make eye contact, to listen, and to attend to others” (346). Turkle values empathy as it is a vital element to human development, but this skill is what suffers when we resort to texting and not gauging the experience of compensating and understanding others through in-person communication. Carr also recognizes technologies affect our interpersonal well being, but focusing primarily on the aspect of the brain’s processes for memorization. In Carr’s writing he composes, “And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains… The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli” (3).