But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
–Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
21. In the last paragraph, Carr asserts that the convenience of the internet comes with a price. By this he means:
A. Accessing the world wide web is expensive.
B. There is too much information available, and not enough time to absorb it all.
C. Deliberate, extended reading has become difficult.
D. People no longer visit libraries.
22. According to Marshall McLuhan, which of the following is NOT true:
A. The media are channels through which information is disseminated.
B. The media tell us what to think.
C. The media delimit how we think.
D. The media are both process and product.