Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Amanda Onalaja

August 24, 2009

Pd. 2-Ms. Brown

I’ve gotten to a point in my life where 60% of my day is spent behind my computer screen. Even if I’m not using it, my homepage is glued to Google. I don’t even own a dictionary, if I need a definition, I Google it. So while reading the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, I found that Nicholas Carr’s argument was dead on. The article is his opinion on how people today not only view the internet as a shortcut to information, but don’t process knowledge the way they used to. Through very powerful displays of logos and ethos, Carr convinced me the convenient Net would be the downfall of my own intelligence.

The article begins with a scene from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which pulls me deeper into reading, but somewhere around the fifth paragraph I notice how long the article really is, and immediately start to lose interest. Carr explains he too has the same problem, “the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”. But how could one deny that the Web is an ever-growing market of knowledge all at one’s very fingertips! How could you not seize this opportunity and use it? However, Carr seems to find err in the idea of abusing such knowledge.

Carr supports his theory using credits from scholars and professors such as: media theorist Marshall McLuhan who said “The Net …is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation; a developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf, “We are not only what we read, we are how we read; even the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzche said, “Our writing equipments take part in the forming of our thoughts”. Included in the passage are summaries of experiments done by different scholars testing the variation of man vs. machine.

Nicholas also incorporates a counterargument in his article, adding the helpfulness of the Web, and how Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, want to perfect the search engine. However, it’s plain to see that the idea of this super system Brin and Page want to create is not what Carr is hoping for. In the words of Richard Foreman, “we risk turning into ‘pancake people’ – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button”.

The author did his research, by backing up his notion that society has abused the internet with creditable scholars and experimental examples. I too feel I may need to take time away from my flat screen monitor and indulge myself in a good book. Carr did make his point evident, especially with his closing paragraph. He recaps the scene in 2001. The “haunting” disassembly of that super computer and its human, almost childlike cries to the astronaut. Carr notes the irony in the film, how the humans were nearly robotic, yet the most human character was HAL.