Review Of Nicholas Carr's Essay: Is Google Making USupid

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To Google or Not To Google?

Google is great. Isn’t it? You forget the name of that actress in that new movie you just saw and BAM! All you have to do is Google it. You don’t even have to think hard about it, because the answer is so close within your reach, just pull out your smart phone or laptop and give it a few seconds to load and there it is. What would have taken you 30 minutes, maybe even an hour to remember was easily found on the Internet with just the touch of a button. I saw Google differently before I read Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making us Stupid”. I went from seeing Google as a tool, to seeing it is a weapon. The beginning of Carr’s essay, jumped out at me immediately and made me think. Carr explains “Over the past …show more content…

Before the Internet, research looked very different. Back then; the common way to research was through textbooks or at the library searching through multiple sources before finding one that suited your essay or research paper. Many people praise the Internet considering how much quicker it is and more easily accessible too. Which I suppose that is understandable, but is it really worth changing our minds for? William Badke states in his article “How Stupid Is Google Making Us?” that, “Google is not making us stupid, but it may be making us shallow.” That is an interesting opinion, however, consider the face that the definition of shallow is “of little depth” (Dictionary.com). Even if stupidity wasn’t accurate, how much greater is shallow? Is that how I want my brain defined? Not me. There was a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from university college London. “The scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors of two popular research sites… that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using these sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity’; hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would ‘bounce’ out to another site”

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