Is Google Making Us Stupid?

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

Nicholas Carr is an American author who writes the majority of books and articles about the continuously evolving world of technology and how it is effecting our society. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, was a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times bestseller. In this essay I will be rhetorically analyzing Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid” published in 2008. The purpose of Carr’s essay was to bring light to an issue that many of us face but only a meniscal few have come to terms with; and that is that technology is mentally incapacitating our society and simultaneously making us lazy. This essay was intended for anyone was has been consumed in today’s culture by new technological advances to the extent of not being able to function without some sort of device, IE cellphone, laptop or tablet on a daily basis.

In 2011, Betsy Sparrow’s experiment tested college students on a number of different levels of retaining information. For the second experiment, participants were asked to read and type phrases into the computer and told to remember the phrases. Some were told their phrases would be retrievable, and others that their phrases would be not be saved. In regard to those that were told their phrases would be saved, she stated, “Participants apparently did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statements they had read.” (777). She points out that all participants were asked to remember the phrase, therefore that specific request had no bearing on the results. “Participants were more affected by the cue that information would or would not be available to them later, regardless of whether they thought they would be tested on it.” (777). Google, and other search engines, are slowly replacing the internal memory functions of encoding, storage, and retrieval when there is an option of letting a computer do the work.

In the article, “Is Google Making us Stupid?”, one could see that there is an issue at hand. With the growth of technology since the early 2000s, the use of the internet has been our, as a culture, source for information. There is so much information that people could not possibly be able to sift through it all. This metaphorical mound of information has occupied our minds as humans, jumping point to point. With the accumulation of data that is at our fingertips, people are being challenged to think, reason, and to read. How then, can we achieve this with all the information but without the ability?

Although its intention was to nourish our minds with an instant unlimited source of valuable information, the internet has caused some people to lose their appreciation for long texts and their ability to concentrate. Within the essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, the author feels that someone has been tinkering with his brain and that he can no longer enjoy reading a book of any length because he cannot sustain concentration on the book (Carr 1). This is a result of the fact that when people use the internet to find information, they habituate themselves to skim along the lines to quickly allocate their answers and once they have gotten what they needed, they close the browser without any further analysis of the information.

With new technological advancements occurring more rapidly each year, it is no surprise that there is an extensive conversation about how these new progressions impact the brain’s development and cognition. One trend is evident: there is a universal acknowledgment that technology is indeed changing the way we think. Among the members contributing to this conversation, two strikingly different outlooks on how these changes will affect the future exist. Either we should be terrified, or worrying is premature. Articles written by experts specializing in psychology and the brain, such as Pinker’s “Mind Over Mass Media,” as well as "How Has the Internet Reshaped Human Cognition?" by Kee and Loh, as well as and finally “Children, Wired- for

In the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Nicholas Carr expresses his beliefs and personal experiences on how the internet has altered our brains and how we think. He addresses the fact that, although our brains’ abilities to deep read and concentrate are suffering, the internet is extremely beneficial and convenient. Because of the easy accessibility, it takes little to no effort to find information, and therefore, a minimal amount of thinking is required. Carr highlights that people are more impatient because of the internet and that our minds are becoming more erratic. The author used research, conducted by a U.K. educational consortium, to show that a new form of reading is developing over time; rather than reading every word on a page, it has turned to more of a skimming method. Nicholas Carr realizes that we may be doing more reading than ever due to the internet, but it is different in the way that people have to interpret the text. Reading, unlike talking, is not a natural ability. One must learn to deep read, make connections, and translate the underlying meaning. Overall, Carr believes it is a mistake to rely fully on computers because in the end, it will just be our own intelligence that morphs into artificial intelligence.

Nicholas Carr, Harvard alumni and member of Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors, questioned the effects of search engines on our minds in his article to The Atlantic entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” claiming that the use of search engines causes a loss of the ability to deeply read and as therefore causes our minds to lose the ability to process information. He used personal stories to depict the apparent change in his and others ' minds from having the ability to "read deeply," to habitually skimming over the text in an effort to hastily extract information. Specifically targeting the leaders of the Google search engine - whom he said believe that, "Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed," - he related several causal reasons as to why the engines affect our minds negatively. He used a study on online research habits from the University College London to stress the point that people conducting research tend to read "no more than one or two pages of an article or book

The article published by The Atlantic, titled Is Google Making Us Stupid? causes the reader to contemplate the effect that the internet really has on us. Technology is used daily by the grand majority of people, and we jumped into this lifestyle without researching the effects it would have on us. Until recently people have not thought twice about this, but now we mutiple people, including scientists, questioning the effects on the brain. One of the hypothesized problems caused by the internet are the inability to retain information. The reasoning behind this thought is we try to be quick about our reading, we do not like being inefficient, what we do is we skim. The writer found this to be true for himself as well as a couple of his friends

In his Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr contends that the overload of information is “chipping away his capacity for concentration and contemplation”(315). He admits with easy accessibility of information online, the process of research has became much simpler(Carr 315). Yet such benefit comes with a cost. Our brains are “rewired” as the cost of such convenience(Carr 316). As the result, “we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s...but it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking”(Carr 317). Carr argues the forming of such habits can prevent us from deep reading and thinking. In fact, he provides may evidences in the

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.

Nowadays, if a young adult hears about a new terminology, instead of going to a library and looking it up in an encyclopedia like what his or her parents would do when they were young, he or she will pull out his or her smartphone and “google” it. Thanks to Google and all other commercial Internet companies, we are closer to all kinds of information, both useful and useless knowledge, than any other time in human history. In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, more than acknowledging the great opportunities which the Internet has brought, Carr brings up his own concern that “the Net is chipping away [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation.” (589) He points out the Net is “tinkering

The internet is our conduit for accessing a wide variety of information. In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr discusses how the use of the internet affects our thought process in being unable to focus on books or longer pieces of writing. The author feels that “someone, or something, has been tinkering with [his] brain” over the past few years (Carr 731). While he was easily able to delve into books and longer articles, Carr noticed a change in his research techniques after starting to use the internet. He found that his “concentration often [started] to drift after two or three pages” and it was a struggle to go back to the text (Carr 732). His assertion is that the neural circuits in his brain have changed as a

Throughout history, no single piece of technology has been so heavily relied upon such as the internet. Things such as the first car, the first telephone, and even the first airplanes were not as easily, or readily accessible as the Net is today. In all reality, the internet is the greatest and most useful tool that humanity has ever dreamt up. From instant transferring of data to endless sources of information, the Net not only connects all corners of the world, but makes each and every person more knowledgeable and self-aware. But as with all new and virtuous things, there is a darker and more dangerous side. The internet is a tool that consumes the intellectual, changing the way the brain functions and ultimately creating a reliance. This reliance is so severe that all of life’s functions depend on the internet without the same dependency being reciprocated. The relationship is one sided, where the Net has much to gain while the user has little. Furthermore, in its relatively new state, the internet is very obscure and has very questionable ethics. Although beneficial in specific cases, the internet affects one’s emotional state and latently mars cognitive function while creating a devastatingly powerful and coercive reliance.

Nicholas Carrs article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” makes points that I agree with, although I find his sources to be questionable. The article discusses the effects that the Internet may be having on our ability to focus, the difference in knowledge that we now have, and our reliance on the Internet. The points that are made throughout Carrs article are very thought provoking but his sources make them seem invaluable.