English Assignment: Analysis of Key Quotes and Main Ideas

This English assignment delves into the analysis of key quotes extracted from various sources, exploring their central themes and underlying ideas. The assignment examines the impact of the internet and digital technologies on reading habits, cognitive processes, and the human brain's adaptability. It highlights how the shift from traditional print media to online platforms influences our ability to concentrate, process information, and form deep conceptual understanding. The analysis covers topics such as brain plasticity, the evolution of reading styles, and the influence of intellectual technologies on our thinking patterns. The assignment showcases how our minds adapt to new forms of information consumption, and how these changes may affect our cognitive abilities. Overall, the assignment provides a comprehensive exploration of the dynamic relationship between technology, reading, and the evolving human mind.

Running head: ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 1
ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT
Name
Institution Affiliation

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 2
English Assignment
1. Key Quotes
So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and
weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman,
having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly
disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “brain”.
Main Ideas
Taking revenge for someone or something that has caused you a bad experience
Me
HAL the supercomputer had malfunctioned and this could have made Bowman to die but
disconnecting the memory circuit of the supercomputer is not a wise move. We should expect
artificial components to have some failures due to unavoidable factors affecting them.
2. Key Quotes
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been
tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind
isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I
can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two
or three pages. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Main Ideas
As time goes by things change and our interests on certain things change
Me
Bowman had the feeling that someone had been tinkering with his brain thus changing how he
things and how the brain operates. He used to comfortable read books but now it is hard for him
to read. People do not remain the same and as years pass our interest and perspectives on various
things around us change.
*Taking revenge for someone or something that has caused you a bad experience
*As time goes by things change and our interests on certain things change

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 3
3. Key Quotes
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. A few Google searches, some quick
clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.
Main Ideas
The internet data bases are more useful and have simplified how one can get information
Me
The web and Google searches have really made research interesting compared to the past where
one had to go through stacks of books. The hyperlinks point to related work but also attract the
researcher to look into them.
4. Key Quotes
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the
information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. My mind now expects to
take in information the way the Net distributes it.
Main Ideas
The Net has become an important tool of communication compare to earlier days where stream
media dominated.
Me
The web has revolutionized how information flows and is stored. It has made it easy for other
people to access information as well as add some valuable information in the web.
5. Key Quotes
When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of
them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they
have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
Main Ideas
Things are changing with time and especially the reading habits of many people have changed.

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 4
Me
People who have been using the web for so long find it difficult to go back to the old days where
they had to spend a lot of their time reading long books. The web reading is more convenient for
most people due to advancement in technology especially the smart phones and tablets.
6. Key Quotes
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described
how the Internet has altered his mental habits. Friedman has elaborated his thinking, he said, has
taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from
many sources online.
Main Idea
The continued use of something alters the thinking habits of an individual.
Me
The use of internet for so long has affected how people think and read. The web has provided a
simpler way of getting the precise information without having to go through long articles.
7. Key Quotes
But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University
College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read
and think. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense.
Main Ideas
Things have changed from how they used to be few years ago.
Me
Nowadays people are using short cuts such as skimming through abstracts and titles to quickly
get information. Web such has provided a large pool of information which promotes the new
stills of readings and they are affecting our cognition.
*The internet data bases are more useful and have simplified how one can get information
*The Net has become an important tool of communication compare to earlier days where stream media dominated
*Things are changing with time and especially the reading habits of many people have changed.

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 5
8. Key Quotes
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new
forms of “reading” are emerging. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the
traditional sense.
Main Ideas
There are changes in the way people search for information
Me
The internet has introduced a quick alternative way to obtain information.
9. Key Quotes
Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on
cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when
television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a
different kind of thinking.
Main Ideas
The reading habit used in the internet is completely different to the one used when print
technology was the dominant technology.
Me
The new style of reading is mainly based on “efficiency” and “immediacy” but the author as he
puts it, it is has really destroyed the old reading style where people could have a deep
conceptualization of information. We are not only a product of what we read but also a product
of how we read.
10. Key Quotes
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our
genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we
see into the language we understand. 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.
Main Ideas
Our brains adapt and function according to our routine habits.
Me

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 6
We the continued use of net reading, our brains is going to be functioning different compared to
those who relied on the print media reading. The brain adapts according to the habit of the
individual and since the net reading is all about accessing information quickly, the brain is not
going to get used to synthesize information rather than rely on finding ready information.
*The reading habit used in the internet is completely different to the one used when print technology was the
dominant technology
*Our brains adapt and function according to our routine habits.
11. Key Quotes
Friedrich had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it
up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was
able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers.
Main Ideas
Doing the same things for several times make the brain to master the routine.
Me
The brain learns so quick what the other organs of the body are doing respectively that is why
Friedrich was able to type with his eyes closed since the routine typing had made the brain
master the various latters. Therefore how we use our brain determines how they will adapt to the
habit.
12. Key Quotes
One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already
terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic.
Main Ideas
The brain is smarter than we imagine it to be.
Me
Despite the loss of vision, the skills of type writing had improved. This implies that a good
practice can stimulate the brain to do event greater things. Therefor a good reading method will
make the brain to have greater thinking capabilities.

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 7
13. Key Quotes
“Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts. “changed from arguments to
aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
Main Idea
The brain is influenced by our habits
Me
The brain can master our routine activities and adapt to perform them so perfect following an
algorithm.
14. Key Quotes
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and
form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly,
altering the way it functions.”
Main Ideas
The brain network changes with time.
Me
The brain network changes throughout the life of an individual and the routine activities they
carry out affect how this network is formed.
15. Key Quotes
Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather
than our physical capacities. The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific
mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. From Judgment to Calculation, the
conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments
“remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct
experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.”
Main Ideas
Every new thing introduce into the life of humans will have an impact. The impact can be both
negative and positive.
Me
The intellectual technologies such as the web reading may have positive impacts on our lives but
they also take away our reasoning capabilities and this really affects our thinking.

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 8
16. Key Quotes
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors
we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of
them as operating “like computers.” Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at
a biological level.
Main Ideas
The brain adaptation also occurs biological
Me
The thinking capabilities are influenced by the brain adaptability and these changes occur at the
biological level. This information is stored in our DNA and it is going to be passed to the
generations to follow.
17. Key Quotes
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. The Internet, an
immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual
technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our
calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
Main Ideas
The internet has replaced so many technologies that existed before.
Me
The internet is taking the center stage for so many life activities and replaces basic technologies
that existed before. The internet has become a powerful information resource in the modern
world.
18. Key Quotes
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds
become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the
audience’s new expectations. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Main Ideas
The new technologies and practices affect the technologies that existed before.
Me

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 9
The net new reading mentality that concentrates on efficiency and immediacy is penetrating the
old technologies such as the television programs where they add text crawl and pop-up to entice
viewers.
19. Key Quotes
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad
influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains
obscure.
Main Ideas
The net is playing so many roles in our lives
Me
The net is reshaping how we think and this influences so many aspects of our lives.
* The net is playing so many roles in our lives
20. Key Quotes
Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into
little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.
Main Ideas
Technology improve productivity
Me
As much as the new technologies affect our brain capabilities, their productivity is always high
compared to conventional mechanisms.
21. Key Quotes
More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had
at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared;
“in the future the system must be first.”
Main Idea
Technology has the capability of reshaping the society

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 10
Me
The technology should be considered as a tool that can change and influence humanity and not
the vice versa as it has always been
22. Key Quotes
The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and
manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best
method”
Main Ideas
The internet is a complex network that ensures efficient sharing of information
Me
The internet aims at providing knowledge in an efficient and easily accessible way than the other
information systems that existed before.
* The internet is a complex network that ensures efficient sharing of information
23. Key Quotes
Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites,
it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it
uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information
and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the
work of the mind
Main Ideas
Google is continuously making internet an efficient and easily accessible avenue for a wide
range of information.
Me
Google is continuously finding new and improving ways information can be accessed from the
internet.
24. Key Quotes
The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it
universally accessible and useful. “In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a
utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency.

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 11
Main Ideas
The more the information found the higher the chances of finding the relevant information.
Me
Collecting a wide range of information will make it easy for someone to find the relevant
information in the internet.
25. Key Quotes
“The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech
a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.”
Main Ideas
Working and researching on something makes it better.
Me
A perfect search engine can be smarter than a person and this will be achieved through research
done to improve the existing search engines.
26. Key Quotes
A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric
Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial
intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to
crack it?
Main Ideas
There is a quest to improve technology and make it better
Me
Google as a company are try their best to make internet an efficient information source and
artificial intelligence is what they want to perfect on.
27. Key Quotes

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 12
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even
replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the
output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and
optimized.
Main Ideas
The new technology is a way of improving or replacing old technology.
Me
Artificial intelligence is a way of filling the gaps which our human brains cannot fill.
28. Key Quotes
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built
into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster
we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities
Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements
Main Ideas
The internet has created a new form of business
Me
The trends in the use of the internet have been used by the internet based company to establish an
income earning business such as advertisements. The routines of net users help them know how
to advertise.
29. Key Quotes
Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect
the worst of every new tool or machine.
Main Ideas
New ideas and technologies are received by some people but others condemn them.
Me
Some individuals will always be against new technologies in the society no matter how effective
the technologies are.
* The new technology is a way of improving or replacing old technology

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 13
* New ideas and technologies are received by some people but others condemn them
30. Key Quotes
They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new
technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted.
Main Ideas
Sometimes people have the wrong perspectives of something
Me
Every new technology has faced resistance since people always oppose change. New technologies come with a lot
of uncertainties.
31. Key Quotes
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth
gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of
books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their
minds.
Main Ideas
Most of technologies have both advantages and disadvantages
Me
Something can have disadvantages but it does not mean it is completely bad. If the advantages
are more significant the disadvantages can be neglected.
32. Key Quotes
Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved
correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual
discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may
replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. Deep reading, as Maryanne
Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
Main Idea
Every technology has a something unique to offer
Me

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 14
As much as people may replace the print technology source of information, the deep reading it
offers, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. The internet may have so many advantages but it
cannot entirely replace print media reading. As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense
cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’
33. Key Quotes
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something
important not only in our selves but in our culture.
Main Ideas
The culture is at risk
Me
The reading culture that contributes to deep thinking is likely going to be abandoned due to the
emerging internet reading.
34. Key Quotes
A man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of
the entire heritage of the West.
Main Ideas
Whatever we do routinely becomes part of our culture
Me
The reading of books is a culture that has been established in our societies and the new style of
reading is interfering with this culture.
35. Key Quotes
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we
risk turning into “‘pancake people’
Main Ideas
The traditional reading culture is at risk
Me
The new reading style is going to eradicate the reading culture and turn us into people who
depend on ready information. That is as the author puts it “pancake people”.

ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT 15
36. Key Quotes
HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human
figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. In the world of
2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a
machine.
Main Ideas
The new technologies change the behaviors and emotions of people.
Me
Bowman and HAL seem to have exchanged roles where HAL is displaying emotions while
Bowman is coldly separating HAL’s “brain”
References
Cui, X. (2016). The internet of things. In Ethical Ripples of Creativity and Innovation (pp. 61-
68). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Strømsø, H. I., & Kammerer, Y. (2016). Epistemic cognition and reading for understanding in
the Internet age. Handbook of epistemic cognition, 230-246.