Pearls Before Breakfast Analysis

In life, there are thousands of things vying for people’s attention. With all of these distractions, many people miss out on art, music, and many other aspects of culture. Though they are vastly different, in Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and Gene Weingarten’s “Pearls before Breakfast”, the authors both address what we miss when we rush through life. “Pearls before Breakfast” is the story of Joshua Bell, a famous musician who assisted in a social experiment by the Washington Post. On a cold January morning, at the L’Enfant Plaza, he played classical pieces for nearly an hour. During that time, 1097 people walked through the station. About 20 people gave him some money but walked on without listening, only 6 people stopped to listen to the music. He made $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed, no one applauded, there was no recognition. No one knew that he was one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million. In the story, it is evident that to properly associate beauty, viewing conditions must be optimal. If you look at the Mona Lisa through a cloudy window, the painting would not be anywhere
In is google making us stupid? We read: I'm not thinking the way I used too. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. 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. Soon after writing this, he refers to a 5-year study in the UK, which found that people visiting their sites "exhibited 'a form of skimming activity,' hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already