assignment= You have read "World and Screen " by Nicholas Carr pg. 875-883. He argues that satellite navigation systems are “not designed to deepen our involvement with our surroundings” (876). What does he mean by that statement? Is his argument persuasive? Why or why not? In addition, how do you navigate to an unfamiliar place? Do you use a map? GPS? Landmarks? Street signs? Something else? Reflect on your preferences. Please respond to these questions in a post of a minimum of 150 words.
Article= "World and screen" NICHOLAS CARR is the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2011) and Utopia Is Creepy (2016). His books about technology, economy, and culture have sparked much conversation on those topics, and the catchphrase “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” comes from his 2008 essay in the Atlantic. He blogs at roughtype.com and tweets from @roughtype. This essay comes from his book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (2014).
THE WORLD is a strange, changeable, and dangerous place. Getting around in it demands of any animal a great deal of effort, mental and physical. For ages, human beings have been creating tools to reduce the strain of travel. History is, among other things, a record of the discovery of ingenious new ways to ease our passage through our environs, to make it possible to cross greater and more daunting distances without getting lost, roughed up, or eaten. Simple maps and trail markers came first, then star maps and nautical charts and terrestrial globes, then instruments like sounding weights, quadrants, astrolabes, compasses, octants and sextants, telescopes, hourglasses, and chronometers. Lighthouses were erected along shorelines, buoys set in coastal waters. Roads were paved, signs posted, highways linked and numbered. It has, for most of us, been a long time since we’ve had to rely on our wits to get around.
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Amerigo Vespucci, a fifteenth-century navigator, uses an astrolabe to find the Southern Cross.
GPS receivers and other automated mapping and direction-plotting devices are the latest additions to our navigational toolkit. They also give the old story a new and worrisome twist. Earlier navigational aids, particularly those available and affordable to ordinary folks, were just that: aids. They were designed to give travelers a greater awareness of the world around them—to sharpen their sense of direction, provide them with advance warning of danger, highlight nearby landmarks and other points of orientation, and in general help them situate themselves in both familiar and alien settings. Satellite navigation systems can do all those things, and more, but they’re not designed to deepen our involvement with our surroundings.