essay on is google making us stupid

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

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Analysis: “is google making us stupid”.

In this essay, Carr asserts that the Internet, rather than Google specifically or exclusively, is in the process of revolutionizing human consciousness and cognition. For Carr, this is a negative revolution that threatens to evacuate human intellectual inquiry of its nuance, and to squeeze human interactions with both complex ideas and our own intellectual lives into a dangerously oversimplified mechanism designed only to create productivity and efficiency: two things that he sees as antithetical to a robust intellectual life.

To more impactfully and poignantly mount his argument, he implicitly and explicitly likens the Internet to previously revolutionary technological developments—most saliently the printing press . By analogizing the Internet to its precursor—a much more widely studied technology whose impact has been broadly felt and experienced over centuries—Carr hopes to lend his argument more gravity and impact. At the time of the essay’s writing (and still today), we have not seen the full impact of the Internet on human civilization. Unlike the case of the printing press, whose invention hundreds of years ago has produced scholarship and scientific inquiry into the mechanisms of the brain in relation to reading, the Internet’s full influence and impact upon the brain and human civilization has not yet been studied or understood in full.

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For Carr, this is not solely due to the technology’s newness, but to the overarching passivity with which it is accepted and employed. In Carr’s perspective , the omnipresent, passive acceptance of both the Internet and its conventions is dangerous. He enjoins the reader to pause the Internet zeitgeist for some good, old-fashioned contemplation—of the type that, ironically, the Internet is curtailing. He invites his reader to engage with his printed words (which, in another twist of irony , the reader may indeed be encountering online) to critique the role of the Internet both in their individual intellectual life and in society at large. He questions whether the Internet’s mandate of efficiency should be uncritically duplicated to rule over the life of the mind, and returns with a resounding “no” to his own provocation. For Carr, the mechanization and mandate to perpetually increase productivity and efficiency creates a flattened and empty intellectual life, devoid of the careful and nuanced intellectual inquiry that the written and printed word engenders.

Carr therefore asks the reader to be aware of how the Internet augments access to vast stores of human knowledge and to attend to the way it creates new paradigms for processing and understanding that knowledge. For Carr, human society has become too focused on the trees (i.e., the amount of information that the Internet makes available) to see the forest (i.e., the way the Internet metamorphoses our intellectual tendencies). The essay is therefore an intervention: a plea to pause the breakneck pace of the Internet and our social and intellectual acceptance of it. Carr fears that without this pause, too many people will passively allow the Internet to remodel their neural and intellectual pathways, leading to a broad social naturalization of the Internet’s artificial technology. 

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To drive this point home, Carr highlights the technological precedent of the Internet: the printing press. The printing press unquestionably revolutionized human access to intellectual inquiry and information. Carr uses this self-evident truth to enjoin his reader to critique the Internet: If the printing press had such a huge impact on human society, then surely the Internet, which also produces radical access to vast amounts of information, will too. It is simply harder to attend to this impact while being caught up within it, rather than studying it from a scientific or historical perspective; that’s where Carr’s essay comes in. His comparison of the Internet to the printing press helps his reader take in the vastness of the Internet’s potential impact—and to seriously consider its impact upon our societies’ intellectual paradigms.

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“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr Essay

Introduction, works cited.

We were at the meeting five years ago, and one question was posed, “Is electronic media likely to substitute the traditional media in a few years to come”? Everybody agreed that electronic media was first taking over from traditional sources of information. Only a few of us held that although electronic media is pushing print media out of business, people believe in seeing and touching, as such, print media will still have its way. After finding or looking for information on the Internet, people will still be perusing through books to confirm its truthfulness. This paper refutes the idea that electronic media reduces the ability of people to think and that it will substitute print media any time soon.

Nicholas Carr, in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” mainly discusses the basis and impact of the way the Internet affects or impacts our reading, reasoning, and writing habits as well as the way our brains are trying to adapt to the changing times in the media industry (Carr para. 3). Carr employs the use of specific examples, as well as statistics, to explain his standpoint even though many people do not agree with it. In the first part of the article, the author argues whether our ways of writing and reading are impacted by Google’s search engine. He states, “Having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial” (par. 1).

Nicholas Carr strongly criticizes not just Google, but also its highly advanced toolbars as he thinks that they will one time turn human beings into machines like creatures. “When we use the Internet, we become mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret the text and to make the rich mental connections….remains largely disengaged” (par. 9). Given that the issue brought up by the author is very important, he provides very detailed instances to prove his standpoint.

The information and statistics employed in this article are very specific and cautiously checked. For instance, from the start, the author comes with a range of conspicuous examples to trap the attention of readers. Then, he sneaks in his rational discussion to demonstrate that Google is actually making people, especially those who use the Internet, lazier, and more mechanical. He states, “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense…, it almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense” (par. 8).

In the end, the author emphasizes that by relying on the Internet for information, we sacrifice the traditional culture that enhanced our thinking capacity. It is like sacrificing what is noble in our lives. “Internet is not the alphabet, and even if it may replace the printing media, it produces something that is different altogether…. deep reading promoted by a sequence of print media” (par. 33).

From the standpoint of Carr, the first thing to ponder or question is whether, as alleged in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” whether human beings are actually becoming more scattered and superficial in their thinking. Throughout his article, the author does not, in any way, celebrate the change in technology. He mainly sees change as a big loss. This, in fact, makes his criticism more superficial and completely misses out on the humanizing aspects of the Web. As a point of fact, it is always easy to criticize any new thing because we have not yet tested its positive sides. In addition, it is very difficult to understand the capabilities that new technology can bring to the life of humans.

In fact, what Carr describes is all about the worry of how we read and write. He must understand that the Net has actually brought a new style of reading. The way we listen to group members in a discussion without being changed into “machine-like” is similar to our reading on the Internet. The Internet is more like listening to a number of people talking. At the end of the day, we find ourselves not changed in any way by the net.

We still find ourselves in the natural state we were before. In fact, different from Carr’s insinuation, we find ourselves continually generating knowledge as our social contacts keep expanding on the Web. With the net, we have actually discovered novel ways of enjoying learning, particularly in a social environment. With this, the answer is “no”, Google is not and will never make us stupid. The only what online platform is actually doing is assisting us in reclaiming our lost learning legacy through a faster exchange of information and ideas in a social environment. Google is, in fact, shaping and making us smarter through the process of re-discovering new ways of learning.

The argument of Carr also fails to convince the reader, particularly when it comes to surfing the Web. Carr indicates that with the Internet, activities in the cognitive part of the brain have completely vanished. As he states, “the variations extend to regions of the brain, as well as those that govern such essential cognitive functions…… our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works” (par. 10).

This is not based on science. In 2009, researchers at the University of California established that searches on the Internet result in enhanced activity in the prefrontal part of the brain, related to traditional reading style. In fact, it is this part of the brain that determines or controls skills such as deliberate analysis and selective attention. Carr indicates that all these skills have disappeared with the increased use of the Internet. As such, Google and the Web, in general, are not making us stupid, in fact, it is exercising and refreshing the parts of the brain that make people better in terms of reading, writing, and even thinking.

However, it must be recognized that this does not mean that the Internet has no side effects on those who use it. Every invention has a lot of good things and bad things on equal measure. Taking into account the Pavlov experiment of conditioned reflex, kids, who are continuously predisposed to binary numbers, take in large visual information, and a large area, that was previously allocated to object recognition, is taken up by visual recognition. Ultimately, literate humans are less introduced to natural details, an aspect that will not even enable them to read the written texts.

The article by Carr reminds me of Plato’s assertion or criticism of the art of writing when it was newly invented. In his dialog “Phaedrus”, he stated, “This invention of yours will lead to forgetfulness in the souls of learners, as they will not utilize their thinking capacities; they will rely and trust the externally drafted characters and fail remember anything…they will be people who fancy listening things that are said by other and fail to learn completely…” When the article is deeply analyzed, Carr seems to have quoted this text particularly when criticizing the print media. He stated, “The easy availability of written materials would result intellectual laziness….and weakening their minds… demean the work of intellectuals and spread falsehood” (par. 32).

In fact, these lines in his article weakened his line of thought more than what they were intended to deliver. They lay out a number of challenges associated with the Internet that Carr failed to specify in his argument.

In the end, the argument of Carr revolves around his strange outlook of the Web or Internet. That is, the author does not in anyway discuss or even mention varied types of Internet reading. Now, when Internet is real in our lives and not fictional, to a lesser scale, he should have discussed the likelihood of transferring media or some form of learning from the online setting to other place that he considers important. To illustrate this point, I have personally interacted with podcast. Some of the activities I engaged in were things like walking, exercising as well as using the computer. The logic or principle behind Podcast is ancient radio lessons which serve to prove that audio is essential in the learning process.

Carr, Nicholas. I s Google Making Us Stupid? 2008. Web.

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Is Google Making Us Stupid?

It's not easy to map the shape of the changes that technology brings to our minds in real-time. We often start from our own experience of using something -- a car, a phone, a computer -- and spiral outward talking to friends, looking for evidence. Nicholas Carr took exactly this path in charting how he thought the Internet was changing the way we read.

"Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going--so far as I can tell--but it's changing," Carr wrote. "I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore."

Noticing his own inability to dig deeply in long articles, he began to wonder what was happening. The article that resulted still receives something like 1,000 visitors a day. Carr's argument style, branching out from anecdote to evidence, has bothered some, but clearly his experience mirrored that of many readers over the last decade.

Carr has drawn some prominent critiques from the likes of Stephen Pinker , who argues that we "shouldn't bemoan technology but... develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life."

You can draw your own conclusions about the importance of the hyperlinked text for your brain, but it's worth checking out some new apps that help you control your reading habits online over on The Toolkit . (Tech taketh away and tech giveth.)

First though, check out this excerpt of Carr's wonderfully crafted story:

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking--perhaps even a new sense of the self. "We are not only what we read," says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. "We are how we read." Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become "mere decoders of information." Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It's not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works. Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter--a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche's friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. "Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom," the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his "'thoughts' in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper."

Read the rest of Carr's " Is Google Making Us Stupid? "

Revisit more pieces from The Atlantic 's archives with the Technology Channel .

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