Can technology limit us?

I ask this question because thus far we have primarily focused on all the enhancements technology provides us. The enhanced ebook is a fantastic example of how new media technologies have taken the “flattened spaces of printed pages”  and launched writing into “multidimensional landscapes.” (Matsuda, Exploring Composition Studies,p. 194). During our last in class discussion, we briefly touched on the Eli Pariser's work on the filter bubble. In his TED talk, Pariser discusses the danger of how the internet's drive toward user customization can be limiting and dangerous. User customization can be a fantastic thing. Who doesn't love having the exact thing they are looking for on the internet seamlessly served to them? This technological enhancement certainly has great benefits but I appreciate that Pariser is having us examine the challenges that the enhancement creates. 

Nicholas Carr posed a similar warning call about the internet in his article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? . Carr argues that the internet may be reducing our ability to concentrate and contemplate. Carr writes, "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. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. 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. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle." 

I appreciate these perspective because they ask us to step back from the lauding of all technological  advancements and examine the impacts of these technologies.  Don't worry, I am not here to advocate a rejection of the Internet or Google. I couldn't live without either of them. My aim here is to ask questions like Carr and Pariser about technology, specifically in regards to enhanced ebooks. As the book evolves with the exciting enhancements of new media technologies, we should continue to be critical of them even as they become as essential as Google and the Internet.