Seeking- the human's new greatest desire

"How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous".

http://www.slate.com/id/2224932/

This is an article of Emily Yoffe from Slate Magazine. She is trying to stress that we are an information-crazed generation. Internet information sites such as Google and Twitter have created an insatiable sense of searching in human beings. Yoffe is able to give us a better understanding of the situation by backing up her information from an experiment done on rats in the 1950's. Just as people of the twenty-first century are addicted to gaining information, rats who had an electrode inserted in their brains constantly were stimulating shocks until they collapsed. No, we are not overloading our brains until they burst, but we are addicted to the constant access to an instant gratification of knowledge. In addition to this comparison Yoffe also uses strategies such as onomatopoeia to get her point across. When she states "While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls", she magnifies the severity of our addiction to computers and how information today is simply one click away. Although she is posing a serious problem with society, i do not believe she is very concerned with changing people. I feel that she is simply making people aware of their addictive behavior.

She Persuades her audience in the following ways:

• "people will neglect almost everything—their personal hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz."
• the use of rhetorical questions such as "Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling?" to make us think about our addiction to this stimulation.
• "our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing".