Rhetorical Analysis: “Is Google Making Us Stupid”
In composing “Is Google Making Us More Stupid” Nicholas Carr wants his audience to be feared by the internet while at the same time he wants his work to seem more creditable. Nicholas Carr uses many different types of evidence to show us that we should be scared and feared as well as his credibility. Carr’s audience is people who think like him, who find themselves getting lost on the internet while reading something, someone who is educated and uses the internet to look up the answers to questions or to read an article or book.
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
It says that Socrates feared that people are relying more on written words than using their memory. He believes that if you don’t exercise your memory, then you can become more forgetful. Carr also believes this to be true because we are using the internet to look up answers for us and not doing the research to find it ourselves. We’re not relying on our memory to remember what we read we’re just looking for the answers.
People who have a higher college education are affected by Carr’s choice to use his colleagues and peers also, his example on Plato’s Phaedrus. This is because his colleagues also have an education and if they are feeling this way then, they are more relatable. Another reason is because an uneducated person would probably not know of Plato’s Phaedrus. The people who are most likely to be influenced are people who find themselves relatable to these things. To sum up his article, Carr mentions the scientist at Google who is trying to make an artificial intelligence for us to use our brains. He wants us to feel scared and be frightened because with an artificial intelligence in us we will be more like computers. Not being able to think on our own, but instead our brains will be running like a
Foer recounted of how “training one’s memory was not to become a living book but rather a living concordance” (165). He goes on to list various beings throughout history that have tried to obtain this goal. Peter of Ravenna authored a book, Phoenix, which was about memory training. Now in the fifteenth century, Peter’s book was a hit as Peter himself “bragged of having memorized twenty thousand legal points, a thousand texts by Ovid, seven thousand texts from scripture, along with a host of other classical works” (166). Peter placed reading in a different way in which it is today. He reread and dwelled upon each work he read, this emphasizes the work staying and settling in his mind. Whereas, reading is superficial with a “premium on doing it quickly” (166). Or Camillo who was paid by King Francis I to build a memory palace for him and him alone. Camillo promised that one “can hold in the mind and master all human concepts and all things that are in the entire world” (168). He believed that there was a magical system where memorizing images, one could understand the connections of everything. Now in the case of Schulz, she talks about a famous philosopher Descartes. He brings up the argument that “error does not rise from believing something that isn’t true, but believing on insufficient evidence” (362). Descartes wanted to be an ideal thinker and take in every bit of evidence he possibly could
Andrea Schlesinger’s, “In Google We Trust” a chapter in her book The Death of Why? The issue is that the internet has changed people and that it may not be a good thing. Google has changed the way that people think greatly, especially in our ability to analyze, understand and know the source of the information we receive from google.
“ Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated” (Aristotle). In the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid” Nicholas Carr presents a compelling argument in which he supports with Aristotle’s three styles for effective argumentation (logos, pathos, and ethos). Nicholas Carr appeals to the reader’s logic and reasoning, the reader’s emotion, and builds credibility within his essay. He exercises several effective writing strategies to strengthen his argument in the essay.
Together they work together as a whole in order to persuade his audience of those involved in technology. Carr uses these strategies in order to back up his information and validate his point. Carr begins by using pathos by stating an anecdote from the movie A Space Odyssey, then he uses logos by stating factual evidence and statistics, lastly Carr uses ethos by stating appropriate vocabulary and conceding to opposition. Throughout the article Carr compares the past and present and how the Internet has changed not only himself, but also people. In order to show his credibility, Carr uses research and examples of other credible writers who have the same beliefs as he does on the Internet. Due to the article being lengthy in text we are able to assume that Carr does that on purpose in order to validate his point that the Internet is affecting our mind as it shortens our attention span and ability to think creatively. The purpose of the excerpt is to persuade his audience of those involved in technology that people in the society today are unable to have complete focus on a longer text due to the Internet causing us to artificial intelligence. For this purpose, Carr develops an influential tone for his audience
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.
From communicating with one another to researching for an essay, these high-tech gadgets are constantly being used. Unfortunately this is slowly becoming a danger to the human mind and an individual's ability to carry out simple tasks. This can be shown through the examples in Carr’s novel. He states multiple times that technology is damaging the brain and is struggling to do the simple tasks it should be able to do. Through his multiple examples, it is clear that technology is hurting us because we can no longer contemplate, concentrate, remember certain details, and more. Although, we cannot avoid using technology, we should be mindful of how often we use
Carr’s message is that Google is not actually making people stupid. It is just making people forget the traditional sense of reading. He expresses that this is a cause for the lack of attention today’s world compared to the time when there were no computers, internet, or Google. I disagree with this argument. If an individual has the propensity to skim over information by nature, than that individual will always be searching for means to gather
Author Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google making us Stupid,” discusses how the use of the computer affects our thought process. Carr starts out talking about his own experience as a writer and how he felt like “something had been tinkering with his brain, remapping his neural circuitry and reprogramming his memory”(313). Basically, he is acknowledging that since he started using the Internet his research techniques have changed. Carr believes that before he would immerse himself in books, lengthy articles and long stretches of prose allowing his mind to get caught up in the narrative or the
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
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr and “How Computers Change the Way We Think” by Sherry Turkle are two articles that explore how technology influences our daily lives. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” discusses the effects of the internet in our society, how it is robbing us of our deep thoughts, memories and our ability to read books. Carr also talks about how the internet has become our primary source of getting information. The writer also discusses about how he’s having difficulty focusing on reading. “How Computers Change the Way We Think” is talking about how people don’t use their brains full potential capacity to solve problems. Instead, we depend on technology to do that for us.
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
Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and Sherry Turkle’s “How Computers Change the Way We Think” both discuss the influence of technology to their own understanding and perspective. The first work by Nicholas Carr is about the impact technology has on his mind. He is skeptical about the effect it could cause in the long term of it. He gives credible facts and studies done to prove his point. While Sherry Turkle’s work gives a broad idea of the impact of technology has caused through the years. She talks about the advances in technology and how it is changing how people communicate, learn and think. In both works “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and “How Computers Change the Way We Think” the authors present
In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr disputes that due to new digital tools, peoples’ ability to retain and acquire information has been negatively altered. Even though, we have information at our fingertips, we often don’t take the time to soak in all the information. Carr mentions Bruce Friedman, a blogger, who finds it extremely difficult to read a “longish article on the web” and to try to focus on the importance of the text holistically (Carr 316). This is an issue that many can relate even Carr knows that, “ the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle (Carr 314). Additionally, media theorist Mcluhan describes the net as “chipping away [mental] capacity for concentration and contemplation” (Carr 315). In essences, Carr states that we are having less of an attention span and consequently, less patience for longer articles (Carr 314). Therefore, this affects media outlets such as magazines, newspapers, and other articles, because they must conform and shorten their texts to fit the status quo that people safely enjoy (Carr 321). In addition, the net forces people to be efficient, and so, causes people to “weaken [their] capacity for deep reading” (Carr 317). People are becoming more driven on how quick he or she has to do something rather than think why this text is important. As a consequence, Carr believes that we are starting to lose our ability to be critical readers and
The following essay will discuss how the ideas in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, is expressed in the futuristic novel Feed, by M.T Anderson.
When most people think of artificial intelligence they might think of a scene from I, Robot or from 2001: A Space Odyssey. They might think of robots that highly resemble humans start a revolution against humanity and suddenly, because of man’s creation, man is no longer the pinnacle of earth’s hierarchy of creatures. For this reason, it might scare people when I say that we already utilize artificial intelligence in every day society. While it might not be robots fighting to win their freedom to live, or a defense system that decides humanity is the greatest threat to the world, artificial intelligence already plays a big role in how business is conducted today.