Nicholas Carr's 'Is Google Making USupid'

Is Google Making Us Stupid

In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, he argues views other people might not have thought of. He claims that the internet has affected how people process information. He begins to explain this point using a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL, a supercomputer, is being disassembled by the man the machine almost killed. Carr emphasizes the fact that the computer could feel it’s’ brain being taken away as the man stripped its memory circuits.

He explains how his mind has become much more unreliable since his use of the internet. “I get fidgety, lose the thread, and begin looking for something else to do,” he says (p.731). The amount of access to information that people have and consumption of it, even greater. He supports this by mentioning how “…hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.” (p.732)

Carr then assesses a scientific study from the University College London that is in comparable with his assessment. The researchers studied and observed the behavior of visitors to a couple popular sites. They

stated,
“It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed, there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense (p.734).
Carr then attempts to explain why this may be occurring in the first place. He introduces a concept called “intellectual technologies” meaning that we begin to take on traits or qualities of the technology we possess. Carr uses the mechanical clock as an example of this by saying, “It helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” “In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses, and started obeying the clock.
For the sake of the title of the article reads, the attention is turned to Google. Chief executive, Eric Schmidt says Google is “A company founded around the science of measurement” (p.740) The creators admit to desiring to devise something just “as smart as people—or smarter.” The developers believe that they are working on trying to solving the currently unsolvable–artificial intelligence on a large scale. Carr mentioned that the fact they say humans would be “better off” makes him worrisome. He concludes his point by saying,
It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.
At the end, Carr says it’s okay to be “skeptical of his skepticism”. Furthermore, he does leave off once again reminiscing of that memorable scene with HAL. Making somewhat of a prediction that we all will soon become “pancake people”. Insinuating, “as we come to rely on computers for understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”. (p.744)
The title of Carr’s article is the clue to what argument he was about to make.

Is Google making us stupid? Carr’s conclusion to his article, gives us the an obviously answer. Google gives us a large amount of access to many types of information and that that access thus making us smarter. Carrs main issues was not being able to focus on reading. His first few paragraphs examine the causes behind it and how he’s not the only one with this problem. His friends and colleagues also struggle with this and so do some impressively credentialed bloggers. Carr realizes that that’s not enough to really prove anything. He begins to cite a few studies of internet behavior, giving them as evidence that there is something to the idea that internet use might be changing the way we think and leaving the audience to come to the logical conclusion that he may have a

point.
He wraps up his arguments by describing what we are losing in the shift toward using the internet as our main information source. He expresses the new idea of considering the mind as a computer and moans the loss of deep, “introspective reading and the intellectual stimulation it provides”. Carr ends with a quote from a playwright, warning of the dangers we face in adapting to a world of “information overload”. Lastly, he revisits the 2001: A Space Odyssey scene he used to open the article. He identifies with the computer in the scene rather than the robotic human. It seems to suggest that internet obsession is going to cause us to become more machine-like than machines themselves.