Rhetorical "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicolas Carr

Are humans being replaced with new technology? Nicolas Carr says reading is not the same anymore, after a few pages the brain and mind start wandering off. In this essay Carr talks about how Google’s search engine makes it easy for people to turn to the internet to obtain any information. Carr suggests that the internet does in fact make us stupid and supports his point through examples, research and studies.

Technologist author Nicolas Carr, wrote “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In 2008 article for The Atlantic, and later expanded on in a published edition by W. W. Norton. Carr explains how technology changes over the years. In his article Nicholas Carr, refers to HAL in A Space Odyssey as a robot, whose mind is slipping away from circuits as he is comparing HAL to human beings. He will then discuss how Google online searching has changed in the recent years.

Carr has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. For more than ten years, Carr has been searching the internet and he says that with online searching it makes it easier to find information in just minutes. Carr states “Once I was a scuba driver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on the Jet Ski”. Carr’s point of view of how technology changes within time. He mentions how television provides summaries of its programs people can also search for articles and view what the information on the article will be by clicking on the abstract. He also says Fredrick Winslow Taylor started inventing the stopwatch and did some of his experiments by going to a factory, and with a group of individuals he recorded and timed their operations. Taylor found that production was increasing factories improving the way of doing things and organizing things. Carr also compares the mechanical clock that began in the 14th century and says “people no longer listen to their senses they started to obey the time, just like they do now with technology.” Lastly, Carr uses Maryanne Wolf, a developmental phycologist as an example of the printing press and she states “mere decoders of information”.

Carr’s sources include the University of College London which includes a five-year research program. Studies found that people are not reading more than two pages. They are bouncing thru websites and not actually reading the material. All new technologies are changing our way of getting information. “James Olds a professor of neuroscience says that even the adult mind “is very plastic”. His friends are doing the same thing, and not reading as much. One of his friends, a composer, noticed the difference when he started writing he focused more on his thoughts of what he was going to write It’s even getting harder to read blogs. Carr says his experience and over the years he knows people are getting information the easy way. Our brain does not focus as previous years. Nowadays if pages are a few pages long, people cannot focus like before, because now we have the ability to search to make things easier. All information can be found by streaming the internet; examples are clocks, TV, etc.

In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr also comments about Friedrich Nietzsche who was losing his eyesight. Nietzsche bought himself a typewriter and found that it is better to type and write as long as he focused on his thought. In 2001, Google provides so much to the people that it makes it so fast to surf the web, and it gives the ability for humans to act like a machine just by clicking the mouse. Google upgrades their technologies on daily basis. Larry Page founder of Google stated “For us working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence”. Google has taken over the human mind and brain. This will provide people a faster and easier way to retrieve information when searching the web.

Conclusion

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicolas Carr provides countless examples and evidence of how Google is making us stupid that makes him creditable. He talked about how the internet changed within time. He emphasized how Google has thousands of experiments a day to update the search engines. Carr provided examples, research and studies to prove his point.