In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, he begins the article with a description of a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the Space Odyssey Dave Bowman argues with the supercomputer, HAL. HAL pleads to Bowman to not disconnect his circuits that control his “brain”. The computer feels his mind going; this is a feeling that Carr has also had.
Over the years, Carr feels like someone is tinkering with his brain. He states that he is not thinking the way he uses to. He can no longer focus on lengthy things anymore. Carr use to be able to be caught up in a book, in the narrative or the turns of the argument. Now, he can no longer concentrate, his mind drifts after only a few pages. Deep reading was something that uses to come so naturally to Carr, now it is a struggle. He has said that reading is different because it has changed over the decade.
More time has been spent online, searching and surfing, and sometimes even adding to the Internet database. The web has helped Carr as a writer. Research that would normally require stacks of books or libraries can be done in just minutes. A few hyperlink clicks, searches, and you know it all. Carr said even when he is not working; he is still on the web: emailing, scanning headlines, blog posts, watching videos, listening to podcasts, or just skimming from link to link. The Internet has become a universal medium.
The agent for the majority information flows from Carr’s eyes and ears into his mind. The advantages of having access to such affluent amount of information are in abundance and appropriately applauded. Wired’s Clive Thompson referred to this as “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” and also written “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” The...
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...needs a faster processor, which is what the Net wants to become.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates mourned the development of writing, fearing that people would rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge; they would, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” They would be filled with false wisdom, full of knowledge that makes us lose touch with our culture. Everyone would also be losing a part of himself or herself.
Carr is still bothered and worried by that scene in 2001. What makes weird is the emotional response by HAL when his mind was is disassembled. In The Space Odyssey, people have become so machinelike that even the most human character is discovered to be a machine. That is the core of Kubrick’s story, as we have come to rely on computers to help us understand the world; it is our intelligence that becomes artificial intelligence.
While his best arguments come from cultural criticism. Written text led to the decline of oral reading and television obliterated the radio. Every technology comes with it’s trade-offs, it just comes down to moderation. There is little doubt that the internet is changing our brain. What Carr neglects to mention, however, is how the internet can change our brain for the better. Computer games have the ability to improve cognitive tasks and increase visual attention. He doesn’t always address the good effects that the internet has had on the world. One of the better strategies Carr uses is switching his point of view from third to first person. He reflects on his personal life and how his life has changed in response to what he has learned. Carr shows how even he has his faults but, being aware of a problem is the first step to finding
Advancements in technology have strived to make life easier for so many people. In most cases, the advancements have achieved its goal, but in the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr questions if the improvements in society have unintentionally hindered our thought process overall. Carr begins the article by providing personal instances when his concentration seemed to diminish due to the internet. He explains how he now loses interest when reading lengthy portions, his mind just can’t seem to remain connected to his readings. He then proceeds to talk about how today’s life is surrounded by the internet, and explains the pros and cons of it. The negative side of it is that his mind now wonders off when seeking information from
Carr mentions the affect that technology has on the neurological processes of the brain. Plasticity is described as the brains response through neurological pathways through experiences. The brain regions “change with experience, circumstance, and need” (29). Brain plasticity also responds to experiences that cause damage to the nervous system. Carr explains that injuries in accidents “reveal how extensively the brain can reorganize itself” (29).I have heard stories in which amputees are said to have a reaction to their amputated limb; it is known as a phantom limb. These types of studies are instrumental in supporting the claim that the brain can be restructured. Carr asserts that the internet is restructuring our brains while citing the brain plasticity experiments and studies done by other scientists. I have experienced this because I feel like by brain has become accustomed to activities that I do on a regular basis. For example, I rarely realize that I am driving when coming to school because I am used to driving on a specific route.
The article begins with the depiction of a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the astronaut Dave Bowman unplugs the supercomputer HAL. Carr uses this to tie in his feelings that, like HAL, someone or something is toying with the wiring of his brain. This is a strong emotional appeal. Carr intends to quickly gain his audience’s attention with the feeling of being “unplugged”, and possibly to gain the sympathies of readers who have felt a similar feeling. Carr proceeds to talk about how he can no longer become absorbed in an article or book, saying “my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.” Again, this works as a strong emotional appeal. English buffs - Carr’s likely primary audience - who read this article may agree...
Carr concedes, saying that his internet theory cannot be based on anecdotes alone, but he is convinced Karp is on to something. According to the study done by College London, people spend most of their time skimming internet articles. Participants hopped from one site to anoth...
According to www.telegraph.co.uk, “[y]oung people aged between 16 and 24 spend more than 27 hours a week on the internet.” Certainly this much internet usage would have an effect on someone. What exactly is the effect of using the internet too much? Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” argues that we are too reliant on the internet and it is making the us dim-witted and shortens our attention span. While Clive Thompson’s article “Smarter than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better” states that technology is not only a collection of knowledge, it also a method of sharing and recording our own knowledge. I fall between both Carr and Thompson. I agree with car on his points of us being too reliant on the internet but disagree when he states that it is making us less intelligent. Meanwhile, I also support Thompson’s statement that the internet allows us to assimilate vast amounts of knowledge but disagree with his opinion on how we should be reliant on
“When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances --- literary types, most of them --- many say they are having similar experiences” (Carr 315). Clive Thompson also elates some words that Nicholas Carr wrote in, The Shallows, “The quality of our thought, as a species, rose in tandem with the ascendance of slow-moving, linear print, and began declining with the arrival of the zingy, flighty Internet. ‘I’m not thinking the way I used to think,’ he worried” (Thompson 354-355). Though Thompson agrees with neuroscientists that we don’t even know how our brains our wired, so how can we think that our brains are being effected by such things like technology and the
An individual’s first thought when needing information has turned to “Let’s Google that!” Carr’s utilization of Bruce Friedman’s article where he states, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print”, adds credibility to Carr’s claims. Here, he once again, shows how he relates to his audience through his statement, “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, and begin looking for something else to do”. He shows through his statement that he relates to Freidman, with similar values and traits, linking the two ideas
Author Nicholas Carr’s 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”(313). Basically, he is acknowledging that since he started using the Internet his research techniques have changed. Carr believes that 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
Carr explains how the internet can distract us making it harder to focus on tasks. He explains how processing information has become harder. Notifications, ads, popups can make it difficult if you are trying to read an article or book (Carr 57). The internet has become the center of our attention (Carr 57). Carr is explaining how this is the reason why we are struggling to comprehend a certain piece of information. He adds in his article that scientists, researchers and educators have also noticed the difference in concentration. And in further detail, he explains that we fail to see the important information, thus affecting cognition. He says that the information we gather is not valuable unless we know the meaning behind it. Carr concludes with explaining that the more the internet evolves the less valuable information is to
Anecdotes have become very influential in the forming of opinions. We often base our decisions off customer reviews or personal recommendations, rather than product labels or factual records. Though it is still important to cumulate and explore the proper avenues of information, it can be challenging to decipher between quantitative and qualitative data these days. Nicholas Carr finds an effective balance of anecdote and research in his essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He begins to illustrate his theory to the reader by starting off with a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey where a supercomputer nearly kills a man. To accurately assess whether this connection is effectively executed, we must analyze the relationship between
What if someone told you the devices you were using everyday were rewiring your brain? Would you believe them? In the article Is Google Making Us Stupid? author Nicholas Carr brought up the topic of Google, and the internet, affecting the way we read and think. Carr opened up the article by relating his topic to a scene from the movie 2001:
Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and Sherry Turkle’s “How Computers Change the Way We Think” both discuss the influence of technology to their own understanding and perspective. The first work by Nicholas Carr is about the impact technology has on his mind. He is skeptical about the effect it could cause in the long term of it. He gives credible facts and studies done to prove his point. While Sherry Turkle’s work gives a broad idea of the impact of technology has caused through the years. She talks about the advances in technology and how it is changing how people communicate, learn and think. In both works “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and “How Computers Change the Way We Think” the authors present
perception of what goes on in his mind. He also uses Watson as a sort
The Internet has created a generation of the most efficient multi-taskers ever born. Many people will have at least four tabs open as a time (Google, Facebook, Youtube, Pandora, Wikipedia, Gmail, etc.). People are constantly jumping from one web page to the next, clicking on links and opening new tabs and browsers. The method through which knowledge is gained has transitioned from deep reading to fast skimming. Every time a web page is opened the viewer is bombarded with information, almost every page has advertisements or links to additional information lining its sides. The Internet has made mountains of information available to almost anyone. It is fast and easy to find information and facts. Essentially the Internet has become the fast food of knowledge. It is convenient but it skips the element of effort.