Summary: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Nicholas Carr expresses his beliefs and personal experiences on how the internet has altered our brains and how we think. He addresses the fact that, although our brains’ abilities to deep read and concentrate are suffering, the internet is extremely beneficial and convenient. Because of the easy accessibility, it takes little to no effort to find information, and therefore, a minimal amount of thinking is required. Carr highlights that people are more impatient because of the internet and that our minds are becoming more erratic. The author used research, conducted by a U.K. educational consortium, to show that a new form of reading is developing over time; rather than reading every word on a page, it has turned to more of a skimming method. Nicholas Carr realizes that we may be doing more reading than ever due to the internet, but it is different in the way that people have to interpret the text. Reading, unlike talking, is not a natural ability. One must learn to deep read, make connections, and translate the underlying meaning. Overall, Carr believes it is a mistake to rely fully on computers because in the end, it will just be our own intelligence that morphs into artificial intelligence. It is true that people are becoming more and more reliant on the internet to do everyday tasks. I feel that Carr addresses the issue perfectly in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. If we continue to use technology for everything, we will eventually lose all ability to deep read and make those critical connections that are necessary for true comprehension and application. He indicates that “the more [he] uses the web, the more he has to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing” (736). Knowing how difficult it was to read and analyze Carr’s article myself, I fully agree with his claims. Having grown up in a world that has always had technology, I must be hyper-cognizant of the task at hand when it comes to something such as reading, particularly if it is something that I deem less than interesting. When I was finally able to get through the entire essay, I started to think about how much I use the internet. I must admit that
With the rise of technology and the staggering availability of information, the digital age has come about in full force, and will only grow from here. Any individual with an internet connection has a vast amount of knowledge at his fingertips. As long as one is online, he is mere clicks away from Wikipedia or Google, which allows him to find what he needs to know. Despite this, Nicholas Carr questions whether Google has a positive impact on the way people take in information. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr explores the internet’s impact on the way people read. He argues that the availability of so much information has diminished the ability to concentrate on reading, referencing stories of literary types who no longer
Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? explains the impact the Internet is having on his (and others) patience with in depth reading habits, and possibly the way their brain is processing information. The old days of having to spend hours researching a subject are long gone because of the Internet. Having such a powerful tool available at any time can be a good and bad thing wrapped up in the same package. Over the last couple decades, home computer and smartphone ownership has been on a steady rise with most homes now having multiple devices. Therefore, having unlimited information available at all times has become a reality.
In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, the main argument the author, Nicholas Carr is trying to make is to explain how the Internet becomes our only source of information. Carr is also trying to warn oncoming generations in how the Internet has affected our ability to read long pieces or to be able to retain information for a long period of time. Carr provides personal experience, imagery, and a professional analysis that is backed by research to hook the audience in and persuade them that in today’s society, the Internet is only causing problems rather than any solutions.Throughout the article Carr provides an abundant amount of rhetorical modes by giving examples and studies from different organizations . Carr gives an insight on the positive ways the Internet had influenced his life.
“Google is my best friend,” said many people in today’s world. Technology was made to make life much easier than it is, but is it really making easier or is it making people stupid? In the article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, author Nicholas Carr conveys a message to his readers on how he believes the internet is making people today stupid and how it is fake knowledge. Carr starts off with an explanation on how he feels while reading a book to get his readers to connect with him by letting his audience that he gets fidgety and zones out when reading and a lot of people can relate to this because they too can get fidgety and lose focus when reading a text. “For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the internet,” (3). Carr goes to talk about his life surrounding the internet and how it brings upon the issues that he has when it comes to reading a single text. Carr uses many rhetorical devices such as imagery and personal experience to draw his readers in to inform and
Does the internet affect the way people think? This is the question Nicholas Carr answers in his essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr writes about the negative aspects of relying on an outside source for information in order to argue that Google could be making us less intelligent. Carr’s general audience is anyone with access to the internet because he believes most people with access to the internet usually abuse it. Because the internet supplies a large quantity of information, people are less likely to learn for themselves.
In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, by Nicholas Carr, he describes the correlation between Internet usage and common reading abilities. While informing the audience about the decreasing reading habits and the power of the Net.
The Article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, has a persuasive and emphasized narrative, into depicting how the Internet has taken prominence of the human mind, explaining that people in todays modern age have lost the aptitude to engage deep reading, because the internet has revolutionized into a manipulating tool, that lets us easily access information with a simple click of a button from a computer and the result is that we are becoming insipid readers. Furthermore, he continues to criticize the Internet as a power system that extracts data from search engines to control the way that humans thinks and to distracts us so they can attain ultimate power over us. Carr, has a strong argument but fails to acknowledge the fact, that our
In, “Is Google Really Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr (2008), he validates how people are heavily relying on the internet pushing for Artificial Intelligence. Carr also talks about how it is changing the way our minds work with negative side effects. He demonstrates how the internet may be shaping our thought process by giving observational examples as well as personal experiences. Beginning with his personal experiences he says how he finds it difficult to keep focused on a book, as a writer, this is rare to him. He tries to find a reason to his inability to stay focused and comes to a conclusion it is due to the internet. Carr is very persuasive in his article, although his point of view maybe seen as an opinion, he does show and support
Nicholas Carr, the author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, writes his article ironically enough for all the interweb to see. In his article, he gives us examples in which the interweb has benefitted him but also changed his brain in a negative factor. He specifically notes in his article that the interweb has specifically changed his mind in the sense that he no longer has the in depth focus that he once had. The example that he gave was at one point in his life he was able to sit down and read his book for hours without being distracted while now he can’t even read more than a few pages without getting distracted. In the article, he has various tests recorded involving college students and their use of resources, a writer’s writing style before and after using a typewriter in the late eighteen hundreds, and lastly what the industrial revolution and specifically the printing press have done that has shaped our society.
What Nicholas Carr is saying in his essay “Is Google Making Us stupid?” is that when we depend on the internet, we tend to skim over long articles instead of taking our time reading the articles. When we skim over things we do not absorb as much information as we do when we take our time reading it. Part of the reason we skim over things that we read is that we get easily distracted and it makes it harder to concentrate. Depending on the internet has made it to where we do not use our brains as much to solve problems or think of new ideas. When you have access to the internet you depend on it for a lot of things and you do not use your brain as often to solve problems.
In the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr he talks about how using Google has affected the way he thinks and reads. In his essay he breaks this down to the psychological side of it and gives examples of other writers from the past, including himself. In today’s society everyone uses Google but, not everyone uses it the same. Personally, I do gain benefits from Google although it has impacted my reading skills. However, Google has not only impacted my reading skills but my revision and editing abilities have been affected as well.
Is Google making us stupid? Nicholas Carr posed the question via “The Atlantic” in 2008 and received an uproar of feedback. His argument was that the internet might have detrimental effects on cognitive capacity. The article in itself, according to online critics, was targeted more at the World Wide Web than at Google, specifically. Throughout the six page piece, he argued that reading on the internet is a shallower comparison to putting your nose in a book. Since then, the topic has been widely debated.
The main idea of the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, the author Nicholas Carr tried to express his concern, how the internet changing our lives and thinking ability and making our brain to process the information differently than we used to. The first thing he mentions in the article that he was having a hard time on continuous reading. Carr goes ahead to give an extremely well-researched
Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? is a great overview of the impact the internet is having on his, and others; life, brain, and habits. The old days of having to research a subject for hours to fully understand it is long gone. Having such a powerful tool available at any time can be a good and bad thing wrapped up in the same package. Home computer and smartphone ownership has been on a steady rise over the last couple decades, therefore, having information available at all times is hard to resist. Having answers instantly with a couple clicks on a keyboard can be valuable, but only to the extent that the information received is true. The impatience with having to spend time researching for the correct answer is ever growing to the point that any type of patience is a dying art. Retrieving information on a device is easier, but over time, can also disrupt the brains process of storing information long-term.
In the article “Is Google Making us Stupid?” written in 2008 as the cover article for The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr looks at and discusses some of the ways that our minds are changing with how our information is now presented to us. In his article Carr instantly connects with his audience in a personal manor by relating tales of his own experiences. He opens his article with a dramatic scene from the 2001 film, A Space Odyssey. At the end of the scene, the machine is talking to the astronaut saying “My mind is going”. Carr continues his introduction by stating that he can feel it too, that he feels as if his mind is being tinkered with. While Carr’s article is definatly informal, he connects well with his audience first off. He constantly circles back to how our we can feel it, we can see how our minds and our way of discovering and interpreting information is changing, no longer can we “spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose” our minds soon find themselves adrift, looking for something different. In a world where everything constantly changes, it isn’t hard to imagine that our minds and the way we think are also constantly changing as well. Over generations our access to information has greatly evolved from what it once was, papyrus turned to tomes, radio shows to televised news cast, and informational texts and data into endless web pages.