Analysis Of How Computers Change The Way We Think By Nicholas Carr

In the Atlantic Magazine, Nicholas Carr wrote an article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr poses a good question about how the internet has affected our brain, by remapping the neural circuitry and reprogramming our memory. Carr states, “My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell-but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the say way I used to think.”

In his essay “Does the Internet Make You Dumber?”, Nicholas Carr argues that technology leaves us unable to be as thorough in our previous mental abilities and distracts us, through changes to our mental pathways and biological mechanisms. Nicholas Carr uses the appeal of data, the frightening effects of living in the digital age, and his own conclusions from his exhaustive research to structure his examination.

It’s hard to believe that Google began as a small online search engine created by two college students in a dusty garage, which eventually developed into one of the most prominent companies in the world. It started in California in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two individuals who aspired to collect the world 's resources in an organized manner, making it universal and accessible for all. Programs like Google expose users to an infinite amount of material, allowing individuals to process information at an unprecedented rate. With just a click of a button the World Wide Web makes this possible, but are we truly aware of the side effects it may have on our brains? The New York Times best seller, Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to our Brains explores how the Net shapes the way our minds think. He argues that the medium to which information is presented can be more influential than the content itself, thus corrupting the minds of individuals in ways that society may or may not be aware of. Carr also implies that the Internet is making individuals incapable of reading deeply, specifically with long pieces of writing, which essentially affects a person’s capacity to concentrate and analyze information. Through Carr’s personal experience with technology, we also get an understanding of the roots of his ideologies.

I feel as though Nicholar Carr succeeded in demonstrating the importance of how the Internet changes our brain’s ability to absorb information. The opposing views of his claim would be that there is not a change in our thinking or that the Internet is not what is responsible for that change. My position is most closely aligned with Carr’s. I believe that the Internet’s convenience has altered the expectations we have for how easily information should be presented. We prefer information to be short, to-the-point, tidbits that are easy to

American writer, Nicholas G. Carr, in The Atlantic July/ August 2008 Issue titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” argues that the amount of time we spend online, especially google, has caused us to lose our minds by “tinkering” with our brains, “reprograming our memory,” and changing the way in which we process information. Carr’s purpose is to contribute to the idea that “Google” along with other online tools, is programing us to be less attentive and to the inhibition of our critical thinking skills. Guided by personal experiences, subjectivity, presumptions, Carr concludes that our reliance on google and other online apparatuses has caused us to become “machinelike,” claiming that the understanding we have of the world and is “mediated” by computers, flattening our intelligence and converting it into artificial intelligence with no value. Carr’s theory is un-logical because it is based on presumptions that overgeneralize the role that online tools like google play on our lives, based on the experiences and opinions of a few. By ignoring the complexities of these tools and the numerous features they have to offer which help enable us to expand our way of thinking and analyzing information, Carr incorrectly assumes that because the amount of information we are gathering and attaining from online apparatuses like google, that we are becoming hollow computer like entities with little to no intelligence.

In his essay, “Is Google Making us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr addresses the fears that many people share about the World Wide Web: that it is rerouting our brains, making it difficult to concentrate effectively. Carr uses personal experiences about his loss of concentration that has become more evident after using the internet. Rather than reading texts in-depth, our brains have become accustomed to skimming over information. Carr’s view on technology is that by relying on knowledge that we are being handed, we are becoming humans with artificial thoughts. He fears the internet could be a monster living in our homes. He is afraid of technology making us an indolent race. I think that the internet can make us lazy, but that doesn’t necessarily correlate to becoming “stupid.” Carr only focuses on the negative altercations that the internet has on our lives. Due to this, he comes off as oblivious to the transformation that we are undergoing with this new technology. The internet is making us change our focus from absorbing time consuming information. Instead, we have shifted our attention to learning information in a timely manner. Over the years, more ways to access the internet have emerged, opening up a whole new world for us. Instead of socializing and working in print, we are delving into a “visual world.” Alternatively, we are being introduced into being able to personally create, develop and consume information. Hearing information from a teacher is being substituted for

The internet sparked a new age of technology that may change the way our brains work. In the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr discusses his concern about the internet’s effects on our intelligence. He was once an avid reader, much like many of his colleagues, yet many of them can no longer dive into a thick novel. The power of Google has prevailed in terms of efficiently gaining information, so they all became fonder of scanning than in-depth reading. Carr even provides experimental evidence that people who are browsing the web tend to only stay on the same page for a short amount of time and rarely go back to it. This is unlike the way he used to spend weeks deciphering long texts. He acknowledges that this new type of reading is a larger part of our lives than any other form of communication that came before the internet, and that our brains will reprogram in order to take on these new qualities. He also notices that the systematic efficiency we created through industrialization is prominent in the Google search engine, and fears this could one day be implemented into our thought process, ending the ambiguity that results from our curiosities. The internet, and the massive amounts of readily available information that comes with it, can actually transform the way we think and perceive information, but it should be something we embrace, because we can utilize it to enhance society.

Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid” questions the motif of technology and if it is making us smarter or if it has made us so dependent on technology and its facility to do things that we are losing our own ability. Carr asserts “my mind expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles… The more they use the web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing,” to emphasize the detriments technology has created and its constant environment of perpetual interference. Though because of technology, and the internet, people have become more efficient and are able to attain information faster. Carr concludes that some people tend to forget is that information is not knowledge, that knowledge is the transfer for short memory to long term memory, and the problem is that people tend to take in too much too fast, and overload the short term memory with constant new information and push out other short term memory to make room. But

Carr observes this in his own behavior, “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” (Carr 20). As people change the way they learn from reading books to skimming online articles, their attention span for the former significantly shrinks, and they no longer find themselves able to sit through a book or even an essay. Also, similar behavior to what Carr experienced was documented in a British study, “They found that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they already visited,” (Carr 21). The internet promotes skimming opposed to actually reading and digesting articles, and because of this people are less and less interested in deep reads and deep thought. They are beginning to refuse any learning outside of the efficiency of the internet, even when better information may lie in a longer

The Internet has many distractions taking our concentration away from our focus. “The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it.”, says Nicholas Carr in his book, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brain. This means that the Internet is like a game and your goal is to stay on task. The average person only remembers around 10% of what they read without distractions anyway. Studies have shown that individuals reading in hypertext don’t retain as much information as other individuals that read the same text out of a book, this is from the constant popup adds, newest fads, and social media distractions interrupting your concentration. Which brings up another problem, retaining

There has been a ton of turmoil about the internet. A controversial issue on whether the internet is more helpful or hurtful to the human brain. On one hand, Nicholas Carr argues that technology may be weakening human abilities for deeper reading, an old fashion type of learning. Carr believes that relying on computers will cause humans intelligent to decline. On the other end, there’s Clive Thompson. Thompson presents computers as a digital tool that assists people in their everyday life. Providing phenomenal external memory, social connections, and endless availability of resources. Both, Carr and Thompson, believe that the internet can act as a tool that shapes the way humans think. Which brings us to the dilemma, is the internet a technological apocalypse or a promising utopia?

With the internet becoming more and more versatile, many people are relying it on for many different functions. Before the internet, researching or passing time would be by cracking open up a book to see what words within had to say. This, however, has changed because of the introduction of search engines such as Google. This search engine allows the user to find the topic and answers to their question just by typing them in. This allows the individual to scan through dozens of sties and articles to find the information that they need. With a book, we’d have to read word after word in order to find the necessary information, but with online articles, we can quickly skim, trying to process only what we think is important. This has caused our brain to change the way we read and concentrate. Once able to read whole books in a few hours, we are now able to barely read a page or two before our concentration is steered elsewhere. This lack of concentration can be an effect of the internet. With multiple distractions and people skimming everything they read, we tend to lose concentration on reading or any other tasks that we may be doing. As humans we tend to lean towards the more efficient route and the internet allows to be as efficient as possible. In reading, in

Technological advancement is constantly occurring within this generation. It happens so often that we as a group are no longer amazed or amused by it-it is expected. In both Love’s and Hayle’s texts, the reader learns that technological advancement impacts a skill that most people believe to have a good grip on-reading comprehension. “Most psychologists assume that people read entire blocks of text on a screen in much the same way as on paper-at least once factors such as eyestrain, scrolling time, and page refresh rates are accounted for” (Love 6). Love is arguing that reading online has more distractions than reading actual print, which is a given. From opening up a new tab and searching for something on the Internet to being able to look up the definition of a word directly on your E-Reader, “screen reading” seems more tedious and demanding than simply opening up a paperback book or actually buying a newspaper in a store (Love 6).

They concluded that people skim from one source to another and rarely return to a previously visited website. The researchers commented that “it almost seems that [people] go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense” (Carr par. 7). This research failed to conclude how people tend to read traditionally. Do readers skim news articles or printed text books the way the bounce around a website article, or is the brain only developing around technology itself? Carr insists that the media has encouraged such fast-past intake of knowledge around ads and pop-ups, but those do not appear in a textbook (par. 18). There is a difference, but it all seems to run together in Carr’s

Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think” is about how computers alter the way people process things. Not in the essence that our ideas have changed, but the way we approach solving issues we encounter. How we need to have a good idea on how things work before we use an easier idea. It’s like they say, don’t try and walk before you’ve learned to crawl. She explains her perspective on how we’ve changed through several examples.