Are Twitter and Facebook Affecting How We Think?

Is constant use of electronic gadgets reshaping our brains and making our thinking shallower?

By Neil Tweedie

How many times do you click on your email icon in a day? Or look at Facebook, or Twitter? And how many times when reading on the internet do you click on a link navigating away from the text that was the original object of your enquiry? The web, it seems, is like an electronic sweet shop, forever tempting us in different directions. But does this mental promiscuity, this tendency to flit around online, make us, well, thicker?

Nicholas Carr, the American science writer, has mined this theme for his new book, The Shallows, in which he argues that new media are not just changing our habits but our brains. It turns out that the mature human brain is not an immutable seat of personality and intellect but a changeable thing, subject to "neuroplasticity". When our activities alter, so does the architecture of our brain. "I'm not thinking the way I used to think," writes Carr. "I feel it most strongly when I'm reading."

INSTRUCTION: Answer questionin relation to text.

TEXT

Which of the options completes the sentence correctly?

Leia a tira para responder à questão.

TEXTO II

In 2011, following the 17th session of its 47-country-strong human rights council, the U.N. announced that it considered Internet access a human right. Four years later, more than half of the world's population still doesn't have regular access. For all its good intentions, the U.N. has no way of forcing either the world's governments or corporations to bring connectivity to the huge swaths of the planet that remain offline. But two of the world's biggest tech companies, Google and Facebook, have taken up the challenge and launched projects to provide universal Internet access.

In a blog published October 28, Google announced that Indonesia's top three mobile-network providers will begin testing its project to deliver the Internet to the whole world. A few weeks before Google made its Indonesia plans public, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company was partnering with satellite operator Eutelsat, headquartered in France, to deliver Internet from space.

While Facebook's and Google's projects have excited many in the tech community, critics have noted that the two companies stand to benefit from them. Though both say they hope the technology will help lift people out of poverty, by getting more people online, the two ad-supported businesses will also ensure there's a new supply of consumers for advertisers to target.

Though their efforts may ultimately benefit their own bottom lines, the two tech giants' attempts to connect 4.2 billion people to the Internet seem likely to have real long-term benefits, such as providing access to educational software; employment opportunities; and online health care, financial and commercial services. And that may mean that sooner rather than later, most people in the world will be online.

"If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise."

(Noam Chomsky)

(Fonte: http://noam-chomsky.tumblr.com/post/7223808896/if-youbelieve- in-freedom-of-speech-you-believe.)

Read the extract and answer question.

[1] “Miss Emlyn read us some of it. I asked Mummy to
read some more. I liked it. It has a wonderful sound. A
brave new world. There isn’t anything really like that,
is there?”
[5] “You don’t believe in it?”
“Do you?”
“There is always a brave new world”, said Poirot, “but
only, you know, for very special people. The lucky
ones. The ones who carry the making of that world
[10] within ________________.”
(Adapted from Agatha Christie, Hallowe’en Party)

Text
[...] Black Friday, which has traditionally been the moment to flock to stores for steep discounts, and which has evolved to also include major online sales events for retailers like Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart, is not all that it is billed to be. We asked J. D. Levite, the deals editor of the product recommendations website The Wirecutter, for some data on just how beneficial the deals are on Black Friday – and the answer was not encouraging.
Year round, Mr. Levite and his team track product prices across the web to unearth discounts on goods of all types, from gadgets to kitchenware. They also look at whether the product is high quality and durable based on their own testing and other reviews, and whether the seller or brand has a reasonable return or warranty policy. By those measures, Mr. Levite said, only about 0.6 percent, or 200 out of the approximately 34,000 deals online, which typically carry the same price tags inside retailers’ physical stores, will be good ones on Black Friday. “There are just more deals on that day than any other day of the year,” he said. “But for the most part, the deals aren’t anything better than what you’d see throughout the rest of the year.” [...]