Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

1175 Words3 Pages

If you find yourself skimming through pages, looking for bullet points and your mind wandering off, you might be suffering the effects of Google making you stupid. These are the things that Nicholas Carr talks about in his essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was originally published in July 2008 in Atlantic magazine. Carr argues that the use of technology on the daily basis has made us unable to go into deeper thought about things. Along with the opinion of Scientists and other “literary types” he asserts that the web has indeed made us change the way we think. Power Browsing is the new way people are reading, this is where you look from title to title, surfing the web from link to link. Overall, he advocates that eventually our brains will …show more content…

While I understand that the mechanical clock brought into our world a separate reality. It also made us into a more systematized society as a whole. It brought people together, making it easier to work towards a common goal. Without the clock we wouldn’t have reached the things we have today. Comparatively, the same goes for the internet. Carr sounds like he is petrified of change. The points he makes about the internet having “far-reaching effects on cognition” are completely valid, and these effects are something to be happy about. His fears towards the unknown argue against logic. The thought of our minds working like machines is something constructive, it keeps us moving forward. This kind of futuristic thinking is the way the greatest minds of America preform today. In the past people were limited as to how much they could accomplish because they didn’t have certain technology to reach what we know today. Because of this many people had to come together over many periods of life-times to create one discovery. Now-a-days, everyone is connected able to share their discoveries and participate in helping each other reach a mutual goal almost instantaneously. Imagine is Albert Einstein had the use of technology. The fact that he would be skimming through paragraphs wouldn’t affect the genius discoveries that he made, in fact, it would propel him into so much more …show more content…

Trying to reflect the fears instilled in himself through comparison to an unrealistic movie. I believe that the internet hasn’t changed everyone’s the way the he says its changed his. I think that people who were born into the world of technology have the ability to analyze into a deeper thought what is needed and skim for instant answer when it’s not needed. On the other side those whom have been forced to adapt to it, such as Carr, find themselves losing abilities they once relied on because they were taught growing up to do both things. Now that the internet has forced them to adapt to it, they can’t focus of doing both types of thinking. The complexity of our minds is deep and that can’t be made shallow by the ability to get instant gratification of information. We simply begin to rule out unimportant things, once the important thing is found then it can be analyzed. Although Carr says his mind isn’t going as far as it used to, clearly that’s exactly what he did in this essay. He used the older “traditional way” of over-analyzing unnecessary things to reach a point that ends up being moot. Clearly, his use of logos, ethos and pathos, although present were not enough to prove his opinion to be

Open Document