preview

Google Making USupid

Decent Essays

Nicholas Carr’s 2008 article in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, argues that the Internet and access to vast amounts of information is corroding the attention spans and thought complexity of the billions of Internet users around the world. As Carr himself puts it, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” (Carr) He proposes that having many different sources at once will cause readers to skip around sporadically rather than thoughtfully consume information, and that Google has an agenda to cause this behavior due to their economic interests. Overall, Carr paints a cynical outlook on the prevalence in Google and any societal changes stemming from its use. David Weir’s 2010 …show more content…

Weir’s entire argument is based on the Pew Internet & American Life Project survey. This survey was conducted by the Pew Research Center, a well-respected, independent, scientific polling and surveying group. It consisted of “895 technology stakeholders’ and critics’ expectations of social, political, and economic change by 2020”. (Anderson) 76 percent of these experts survey agreed to the statement, “By 2020, people’s use of the internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid.” (Weir) This scientific data is completely detrimental to the argument make by Carr in The Atlantic. Weir goes on to highlight three key expert perspectives submitted in the survey and concludes by hyperlinking to the survey so that the reader can study further into the matter. In stark contrast, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” makes no use of any concrete data related to the subject. To be fair, however, Carr does point out this weakness by stating, “Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition.” (Carr) He does mention one expert, Maryanne Wolf, who believes that “[we] are how we read” and reading online makes us become “mere decoders of information” (Wolf qtd. in Carr), but other historical points are made citing experts and examples from 1882, 1911, 1936, 1976, and 1982, all of which are irrelevant to his central argument since they come from an age where Internet content consumption was not a reality. Carr is utterly lacking in any substantial logos and his reasoning typically draws on his appeals to pathos rather than facts. Therefore, Weir is the clear winner in his use of

Get Access