Technology and Us According to Nicholas Carr

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.

I must admit that I have Google set as my homepage and before actually thinking how much I know about a particular topic, I automatically “google” the topic. I realized how much it has affected my cognitive ability and overall concentration. Our brain is constantly making new connections, therefore taking on qualities of the technology around us. The way humans explain themselves to others is changing because of the way we are unconsciously adapting to “intellectual technologies.” This means that we are allowing the information we read on the internet to alter the way we view not only ourselves, but the world around us as well.

In his article entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Carr expresses his concern over the way the internet is changing our brains. Every since he started skim reading on the internet he’s lost his ability to read for a long time; “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do” (Carr 314). Our minds have adapted to reading on the internet. We take in vast amounts of information in a short period of time and so anything that’s long can’t hold our attention. We are no longer to analyze and think deeply about texts because we can’t focus for that long. I definitely feel the effect of skim reading. I do read a lot but I don’t deep read. Whenever I’m trying

Media and technology are permeating and changing every part of our lives, but are there consequences to these changes? Nicholas Carr questions if the Internet is helping people as much as it is believed to in his essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” With an increased reliance on the Internet, Carr has found patterns of shortened attention in himself and among others. Carr points out frightening changes occurring in human behavior and the workings of the brain that have now become evident in our society’s younger generation and could have devastating consequences.

In Nicholas Carr (Is Google Making Us Stupid?) he expresses his thoughts of the internet, and how it is effecting our minds. He goes in on how it becomes hard to comprehend long articles and books. It seems as if our brains start to become unfocused as we try not to skim the words; yet, or brains do as they please causing us to become distracted from the writings in front of us.

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

Carr gives Google credit where it is due, but he also accuses this plethora of easily accessible information of "chipping away [my] capacity for concentration and contemplation" (Carr 390). Being able to obtain any information at anytime does give people a reason to not store any knowledge or worry about remembering important things--if you forget something, you can just look it up again. It is easy to see how Carr considers this a negative effect of technology playing such a large role in

In the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid” written by Nicholas Carr, Implies that Google is making us lazy and I do agree when Carr points out and states “And what the next seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” In this statement alone Carr is implying that the unlimited resources of information that Google and other web search engines are providing right down to our fingertips is making our mind lazy, and we no longer need to concentrate on physically searching for that information like we used to before the Internet by going to libraries, and read books, or search through newspapers and articles.

As the internet offers us the benefits of quick and easy knowledge, it is affecting the brain’s capacity to read longer articles and books. Carr starts Is Google Making Us Stupid with the closing scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when Dave taking apart the memory circuits that control HAL, the artificial brain of the ship. Carr feels the time he spends online is rewiring his brain. He is no longer able to concentrate long enough to read more than a few paragraphs. Even though the internet is useful, it seems to be changing the way our brain takes in information. He feels as though this brain wants to take information in the same way the internet disperses it: in

If we're distracted, we understand less, remember less, and learn less.” Without a doubt, this proves that Google can make our brains stressed out because of all the distractions and information on the

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

To begin, the internet is altering the human ability to concentrate for long periods of time. There are many distractions on the internet. Even if people are looking for something as small as a definition on the internet, all of the hyperlinks and ads can make people stray away from finding it. Many people begin to get fidgety and lose concentration after only a couple of pages. Nicholas Carr struggles with keeping his concentration by stating in his essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid” that “ I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do” (Carr 731). A person could be checking the score of a football game when all of the sudden an email message appears and totally diffuses that persons attention away from the score of the game. Also, the human brain is beginning to adapt to receiving information quickly. Research that took days of searching through multiple books can now be done in only a few

Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Online 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”. Since starting to use the Internet his research techniques have changed. Carr said 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 arguments”(July/August 2008, Atlantic Monthly). Today Carr has found that “his concentration drifts away from the text after several pages and he struggles to get

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

It is true that people are becoming more and more reliant on the internet to do everyday tasks. I feel that Carr addresses the issue perfectly in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. If we continue to use technology for everything, we will eventually lose all ability to deep read and make those critical connections that are necessary for true comprehension and application. He indicates that “the more [he] uses the web, the more he has to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing” (736). Knowing how difficult it was to read and analyze Carr’s article myself, I fully agree with his claims. Having grown up in a world that has always had technology, I must be hyper-cognizant of the task at hand when it comes to something such as reading, particularly if it is something that I deem less than interesting. When I was finally able to get through the entire essay, I started to think about how much I use the internet. I must admit that