The Changing Of Mind By Nicholas Carr

There’s no denying that technology has grown to play a major role in education and learning. Students are using laptops, tablets, and smartphones to research, complete, and even collaborate on assignments, both in and outside of the classroom. Timothy D. Snyder and Thomas L. Friedman both have written articles expressing their opposing opinions on technology in the classroom. Timothy Snyder is a Professor of History at Yale University who has written five different award-winning books. In his article, “Why Laptops Are Distracting America’s Future Workforce”, Snyder explains to students and teachers why he is against technology in the classroom. Thomas Friedman is a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, author of six award-winning

Technology nowadays always use to have so much information at our fingertips, but is this a good thing? That is what Jamais Cascio’s “Get Smarter” and Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” both discuss; they specifically address the effects that new technology, such as the internet, has on the way humans think. The difference is that Carr argues that this new technology is making us stupid while Cascio argues that it is making us smarter. Nicholas Carr’s article discusses the negative effects of the internet and technology like it. It specifically mentions slight changes in the way people do things because of the influence of technology and gives many historical and anecdotal examples. Jamais Cascio’s article is about the advancements of technology and how it is makes people smarter. Cascio talks about Twitter, mental enhancement drugs and AIs, focusing a lot on the benefits of the advancements.

Technology has evolved so much over the course of 82 years. People who were living in 1935 would have no clue what a computer is or what it could potentially become. Education itself and how we learn has come a long way. Everything was hand written. Now in 2017, we have every answer with just one touch of a button. Google is a search engine that holds almost every answer in the world. There are many opinions on the way humans in 2017 function, and process information. Nicholas carr is a respect author who writes about the relationship between technology and culture. He has written for the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, etc. He has written two great essay that have won The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best collected in Several Anthologies, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and The Best Technology Writing. One of them which is titled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid.”  Nicholas Carr argues that Google is not making humans stupid, but as technology progress our minds must adapt and change the way we think and process information. This essay has many rhetorical approaches. Nicholas Carr uses imagery, opinion, ethos, and pathos to persuade his audience, provoking a doubt on whether google is making humans stupid.

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.

The internet – the decisive technology of the Information Age – is making its way in an attempt to make life easier for people and undeniably, it is very effective in doing so. However, in the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr talks about how that artificial intelligence is taking over our own genuine intelligence. He discusses the changes that have occurred in people since the internet became a universal medium to access information. Carr’s main purpose is to make us aware that the internet is having negative effects that diminish our capacity of concentration and contemplation. In his thesis he states that “as we come to rely on computers to meditate out understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens

Technology, especially the Internet, makes humans’ life easier and more effective. A quick access to information brings people a huge opportunity to explore the world and develop them. However, Nicolas Carr, in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” argues that technology affects people’s life, it changes their mind and actions, and humans start to lose abilities of “deep thinking and deep reading”, which are essential skills of being humans. In other words, our world becomes more simplified that people are unable to be smart and creative as they were in the past. For him, today’s people think and act in the frame of programmed world of the Net. Moreover, although Carr worries that the Net based corporations, such as Google, are seeking to replace human’s

Being able to instantly gather information is easier than it has ever been before. People can go on the internet, press a few buttons and are given an endless amount of information. Do not anything about the topic, just Google it and it will provide the information that is needed. It has come to the point where people rely on the internet daily. However, there are downsides to having technology surrounding society most of the time. In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid? ” from the July/August 2008 edition of The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr, a writer and former member of Britannica’s Encyclopedia editorial board of advisors, expresses how technology is negatively changing how we think and act because of the influences people get from the technology

Carr’s premise is that the Web is interfering with our ability to focus on lengthy material. On the contrary, the internet is actually aiding our ability to focus on reading. This holds true for younger children, who are known as the digital natives in our generation. In a research conducted by The National Center for Education shows that “by altering the mode of reading material from traditional paper-based reading to online reading,” the interest of elementary school children increased (Wright 367). Because children of the 21st century are surrounded by technology, they are more likely to gear towards digital media for their mode of learning. Contrary to Carr’s view that the internet “is chipping away [the] capacity for concentration and contemplation,” these children are more likely to read and focus as a result of

Nicholar Carr, executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and author of “Is Google Making Us Stoopid” argues that our dependency on the easily accesible, information rich Internet medium is gradually morphing our conscious thought process, making it harder to immerse ourselves in deep concentration and contemplation of information resulting in the diminishment of our unique intelligence into that of an artificial intelligence. On the other hand, Jamais Cascio, senior at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and author of “Get Smarter” illustrates the Internet as a medium capable of increasing our overal ability to think, evolving the human brain to be capable of multitasking quickly and effectively making judgements in a short amount of time. Technological progress has come across it’s fair share of admiration and fear on how it might change our natural ability to think. Being one of those technological progress, Internet has changed the way we read and think, currently diffusing our ability to concentrate on specific information, but in the long run trasforming us into a more efficient being, capable of quickly amassing knowledge from a rapidly growing ocean of database.

Andrea Lunsford, an English professor at Stanford University, states that technology is not hurting students, but it is helping students. Many people believe that ,while students are on the internet, they are wasting time and not learning anything. After concluding that students were using the internet for a substantial amount of time, Andrea Lunsford and her research team discovered that, “rather than leading to a new illiteracy, these activities [seem] to help [students] develop a range [. . .] of writing styles, tones and formats along with a range of abilities” (Lunsford 571). The internet contains many different that students have access to.

The Evolution of Technology What if all through schooling, grades first through twelfth, the use of any technology was not allowed? Not even as a learning resource or tool?

It is often said, that the presumptions of negatives and positives impacts of technology is bigger than one may believe as technology is used in everyday life throughout the nation. Nicholas Carr argues that technology is a negative impact of human’s minds because such resources like “google” is making society stupid due to the fact that one’s cognition is diminished.  On the other hand, Clive Thompson shares different conclusions that acknowledge technology as positive aspect of new forms of human cognition and boosts our cognitive abilities, which is making us smarter, more productive and

Google allows individuals to neglect additions to their intellect by providing the answers to all of life’s problems. When one has the option of performing a quick google search to find an answer or thinking for themselves, they will always choose a google search. Through Google, one can find and then forget an answer, whereas when coming up with answers through usage of individual intellect facts and answers are more often retained and learned. In a sense, Google has become the sum of an individual’s intelligence. Even if a person is uneducated and unintelligent, if they can Google, they can keep up with the rest of the population. This notion plants a seed of fear in the hearts of many. One such person who fears the impact of Google on an individual’s intelligence is author and researcher Maryanne Wolf, who told Jay Tolson, “I have always thought of the internet other media as tools we had some kind of control over, but what I’m worried about is that they have almost become the content instead of the tool,” (Tolson 1). Maryanne succinctly and concisely sums up the threat Google and technology poses to human intelligence. There was once a time where computers merely replaced devices such as the typewriter. Capable of typing, the early computer was limited by the intelligence of the user. Today’s computers have the capability to spell check, grammar check, and fact check a

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” is a magazine article written by Nicholas Carr in 2008. In the article, Carr argued about technology,

( Richtell, 2010, para. 3). Richtell, with this one statement, is telling us that the current generation is after instant gratification. That perhaps children raised on technology can no longer maintain any sort of attention span and explores this very issue in this article. The student Richtell is writing about is a bright student, yet gets low grades in subjects like English and Algebra II. The article focuses on one student, how technology has become a distraction and hindered his learning. The reader can get a sense of the issue at hand and can see how it not only applies to today’s generation, but that technology has also become a distracting force for many adults as well. However, Technology does show promise in actually increasing memory and cognitive functions in the older population, so there is hope it can be