Cashe’ Fann
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Over the years, technology has thrived and became very popular. One of the most used technologies over the time is the Internet. Although, it is very popular many have noticed the effects that it has on our mind and the way we process new information. It’s a struggle to even deeply read an article that is more than a few pages for many that once was so very easy. Nicholas Carr is one of the many people that have noticed what the Internet is doing to us!
Nicholas Carr believes that Google is making us stupid, I totally agree with him! This article is appealing to me because it is a modern day problem and has a lot of controversy over the issue. I also chose this article because I too am a frequent user
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of the Internet and can relate to the effects that it has on people. I didn’t really notice until I actually read the article that I would often catch my mind drifting to something else or checking my phone several times before I could finish the piece I am reading. This changed my outlook on the Internet and how “helpful” it really is. He supports his stance that the Internet can have bad effects on our brain by personal experience and historical events that spoke on the effects that technology has on our mind and the way we think. He then went on telling us how he too is a big Internet user and how hard it is being able to stay connected to a text without being distracted. As he noticed the problems he now had with the Internet “chipping away” at his brain he spoke to some of his friends that are credible writers and discovered that many of them had the same problems. Carr used a historical event when he explained, that the writer Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter when his vision was failing and he learned to use the typewriter pretty quickly but unfortunately it changed the quality of his work. Not only did the writer himself notice the changes this new technology had on him but others that surrounded him as well. This was a great way to give support on how he felt about the Internet effects on our mind and how it was changing us. Carr’s main purpose for writing “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” is to make people aware of what the Internet is doing to our mind.
He also want to stir up the conversation about what the Internet effects in general. He uses the rhetorical appeal ethos in the article a lot to support his arguments. He used ethos in the article, when Carr included the media theorist Marshall McLuhan statement about the internet which explained how the media not only provides information, but also shape the process of thought. McLuhan made this statement in the 1960’s and we now see that this is true from research and many other professionals. We no longer fully read articles or stories we often “skim” and click the links to find what we are looking for. He often used past and present situations to describe the effect that Internet has had on people too. Carr used the metaphor “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” This metaphor perfectly described how his mind has changed and how he now reads compared to how he did in the …show more content…
past! Although, He uses ethos a lot in this article Carr also used the rhetorical appeal pathos to catch his audience attention. Carr talked about the way he had to constantly “drag his wayward brain back to the text” he was reading. This showed his inner struggle he had with the new way he thought. He then went on about how even when he wasn’t working he still spent a lot of online whether it was writing e-mails, watching videos or scanning blog posts. He showed he too had been effected by the Internet. In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr tries to capture his audience by including relatable experiences.
He targets the younger generation because that is whom and will be mostly effected by the Internet and other technology. He immersed the audience in the article by speaking on text-messaging which is very popular for the younger generation. Carr admitted, that yes we might be reading more today than we did in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when the television was our medium, but it’s a different kind of reading, and has terrible effects on the way we think. Maryanne Wolf worries that the style of reading, might just be weakening our capacity for deep reading that emerged from earlier technology. She once said we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” The ability to interpret a piece of writing, and make connections remains disengaged because of this new way we are accustomed to reading called “skimming”. This is taking a huge toll on the younger
generation! While many might agree that Carr beliefs that Google is making us stupid is correct, many still disagree. Over the time we have noticed that the human brain is changing all the time and is not what we once thought it to be. Nicholas used the example that people used to think once you reach adulthood our neurons are fixed and will not change. Brain researches discovered that this isn’t true, the brain will always have the ability to reprogram itself and constantly alter the way it functions. Without any thought we tend to let the Internet do most of our thinking for us, it’s our clock, calculator, and many other things. The Internet is doing more harm than good in our society. Google believe they are developing “the perfect search engine. Carr explained, the more information we have “access” to from their site, the more our thinking improves. The founders of Google would even like to take this search engine as far as making it an artificial intelligence, and attaching it to the human brain. This would eliminate fair chances in society and earning your education. Not only would fair chances be gone but it might just wipe out education as a whole if you don’t have to learn anything by having an artificial brain that does all the thinking for you. This would be taking the easy way out and wouldn’t benefit us in the long run by having no education that was once so important. In our society Carr showed how the Internet and technology is used in everyday life and is involved with mostly everything we do. Even if you do decide to read a piece from time to time there will still be something about web surfing or of the sort included in it. Carr shared that, The New York Times decided to devote a few pages in their articles on “shortcuts” for the web to read the article instead of the slow traditional method of turning pages and reading. The web is involved or play a part in mostly everything that goes on. Google is without a doubt making us “stupid”. Carr was absolutely right about his thoughts on how the new technology is harming our mind. Although, it has done damage already we still have time to save ourselves from this negative effect it has had on our brains in the last few years. We need to come back to our natural senses and be able to once again deeply read pieces without being distracted. It has such a broad influence over the way we think and process things, it shouldn’t be this way. As humans we need to be able to communicate and be able to process important information as we once did before!
Both Nicholas Carr and Malcolm Gladwell debated how the Internet has affected humankind in both positive and negative ways. Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of Small Change:Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted. Nicholas Carr is a writer who has formerly written for the New York Times, The Guardian etc, he also wrote Is Google Making Us Stupid? Gladwell’s and Carr’s essays identifies how the internet has a damaging effect on people.
While his best arguments come from cultural criticism. Written text led to the decline of oral reading and television obliterated the radio. Every technology comes with it’s trade-offs, it just comes down to moderation. There is little doubt that the internet is changing our brain. What Carr neglects to mention, however, is how the internet can change our brain for the better. Computer games have the ability to improve cognitive tasks and increase visual attention. He doesn’t always address the good effects that the internet has had on the world. One of the better strategies Carr uses is switching his point of view from third to first person. He reflects on his personal life and how his life has changed in response to what he has learned. Carr shows how even he has his faults but, being aware of a problem is the first step to finding
The article by Nicholas Carr Is Google Making Us Stupid, Carr main argument is as the Internet has become an integral part of our society is changing the way we process information to a simply way of processing information. My interpretation of Carr main argument is that the Internet has made it harder to process complex information and now rendering to process information in a simply manor. The reason he accomplished expressing his argument in a effective manor was his use appeal to Karos, Ethos & Logos; also, with the aid of rhetorical devices.
From the beginning of Carr’s article he explains that the internet itself is making “us” more stupid. Carr talks about how his mind has changed over the years because
He states how he used to spend hours reading, but his concentration started to drift after two or three pages. He backed up his theory with stories from others who say they’re experiencing the same thing. But they still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how the internet affects cognition. After a brief history lesson, Carr starts to incorporate Google into the article. He tells us about Google’s history and their mission. Carr states how Google, and the internet itself, have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind. Apparently these companies do not want us reading slowly or for leisure. Carr then ends the article by stating that we are turning into robots ourselves, and that we are relying on computers to mediate our understanding of the
Moreover, Carr’s article mentions that by using technology of any kind, users tend to embody the characteristics stimulated by that technology. He says that given that the Internet processes information almost immediately, users will tend to value immediacy. To explain, Carr gives the example of a friend of his named Scott Karp who was a literary major on college and who used to be an avid book reader. However, since the arrival of the Internet, Karp skim articles online because he could no longer read as much as he used too. He cannot pay attention and absorb long texts ever since he read online articles. Internet...
With the rise of technology and the staggering availability of information, the digital age has come about in full force, and will only grow from here. Any individual with an internet connection has a vast amount of knowledge at his fingertips. As long as one is online, he is mere clicks away from Wikipedia or Google, which allows him to find what he needs to know. Despite this, Nicholas Carr questions whether Google has a positive impact on the way people take in information. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr explores the internet’s impact on the way people read. He argues that the availability of so much information has diminished the ability to concentrate on reading, referencing stories of literary types who no longer have the capacity to sit down and read a book, as well as his own personal experiences with this issue. The internet presents tons of data at once, and it is Carr’s assumption that our brains will slowly become wired to better receive this information.
Carr explains how the internet can distract us making it harder to focus on tasks. He explains how processing information has become harder. Notifications, ads, popups can make it difficult if you are trying to read an article or book (Carr 57). The internet has become the center of our attention (Carr 57). Carr is explaining how this is the reason why we are struggling to comprehend a certain piece of information. He adds in his article that scientists, researchers and educators have also noticed the difference in concentration. And in further detail, he explains that we fail to see the important information, thus affecting cognition. He says that the information we gather is not valuable unless we know the meaning behind it. Carr concludes with explaining that the more the internet evolves the less valuable information is to
Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid." July/August 2008. The Alantic Magazine. 20 February 2012 .
These two articles are similar in the sense that they agree that the internet and computational objects are reshaping our brain’s structure by changing our neural circuit. By using examples from their personal experiences to identify a trend in technology use, the authors illustrate that the more we bury ourselves in technology the more we are unable to understand material which leads to loss of concentration and the ability to think for ourselves. As an author, Carr finds the internet a beneficial tool, but it’s having a bad effect on his concentration span. Carr points this out by stating “Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy, now I get fidgety, lose the thread and begin looking for something else to do” (39). He is no
Paragraph 14-16: Carr concludes that reading helps the brain to develop a rare kind of mental discipline. Our ancestors needed the constant shift in attention to survive but since then we have evolved to this mental discipline. The internet is whats making us go back to the way our ancestors use to think and possibly even making our brains worse.
The internet has made things quick and easy to accomplish, but it has had negative effects on concentration and the reading abilities of individuals. The internet is changing many thing around us, but maybe not all are good changes.
After seeing the study in a new light, I realized that I had another question. Who is Nicholas Carr? I went back to the article and clicked on his name. I was brought to a page listing some of his other published works. “Should the Laborer Fear Machines?,” “All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,” “Googlethink,” and then of course, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I was sensing a theme in Carr’s work. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it showed me that he fears technology. His article is now in my category “gloom and doom.” I think his article has many good arguments to show the dangers of the internet but lacks the opposing viewpoint. Carr lifted a quote from Wired’s Clive Thompson. A single line. “The perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking… “ (Thompson). It makes you think that Thompson is ready to beam up onto the mothership, but when you read the entire passage, “…Still, I have nagging worries. Sure, I'm a veritable genius when I'm on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I'm not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?” (Thompson). Thompson has his doubts, as he
Half of the world’s population has access to the internet and is increasing due to the evolution and development of technologies in our society. These powerful technologies tend to increase how many hours we spend staring at a screen, slowly rewiring our brains and changing the way we analyze things. The Internet has a potential to help us periodically, but it can also affect us negatively, mentally, and physically, shown in The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. In the novel The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, he shows a similar mindset towards the negative effect of the internet and how it affects our ways of thinking, receiving, and changing the way we act by using different tools. The internet has a very strong influence and is deviously rewiring our abilities to learn and converse with others. Carr’s argument and standpoint is a qualification that the internet is turning us into shallow individuals, people who have no in depth
From my perspective, Nicholas Carr’s argument that the internet appears to be decreasing his capacity for concentration and contemplation does apply to my generation’s internet natives. Generation Z, my generation, has an innumerable amount of internet natives who are perfect examples of Carr’s argument against the internet. My generation, who will be the leaders of the world, are losing their mental capacity because of the frequent use of electronics but especially the World Wide Web. Approximately twenty percent of children from ages eight to sixteen have a computer in their bedroom, and fifty four percent have internet access. Unfortunately, Carr’s argument applies to my generation’s web natives because they are engrossed in the web for twenty-four hours and seven days a week which leads to a plethora of them being sidetracked while doing their activities, unable to focus and reflect on many ideas, and their way of thinking is being modified.