Is Google Making Us. What Are Us?

The debate over the internet's influence on human minds has been long running. Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" article successfully defends both opinions on this issue. He has plenty of history on the topic and has seen much success in previous works. Carr uses his past to impact the present issue society is challenged with every day. With his background on the subject, Carr is able to establish credibility as a speaker before he reasons for both sides of the debate successfully.

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, makes statements about how beneficial it can be for people to have information at our fingertips, but Carr also expresses how not only him, but other people say they feel almost illiterate, or foolish when they go back to read an actual book and analyze the text of a book or response they were once able to comprehend with no troubles.

I agree with Nicholas Carr's theory, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Carr argues that search engines, blogs, hyperlinks, etc. dump more information that one can possibly read. I agree with that, and I think

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

Google is something that made people’s life easier. It’s the search engine that delivers useful information about anything. Most of the time people will google to find information that they need without even figuring it out by themselves first. Internet is affecting us in a negative without us even noticing. Now days’ technology is so advanced that we have access to internet everywhere like cellphones, laptops, and computers. Google is changing the way we process information it’s changing the way we think. Technology is effecting our mental abilities and we don’t put much effort in our researches, which is convincing the danger of the technology and internet.

American writer, Nicholas G. Carr, in The Atlantic July/ August 2008 Issue titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” argues that the amount of time we spend online, especially google, has caused us to lose our minds by “tinkering” with our brains, “reprograming our memory,” and changing the way in which we process information. Carr’s purpose is to contribute to the idea that “Google” along with other online tools, is programing us to be less attentive and to the inhibition of our critical thinking skills. Guided by personal experiences, subjectivity, presumptions, Carr concludes that our reliance on google and other online apparatuses has caused us to become “machinelike,” claiming that the understanding we have of the world and is “mediated” by computers, flattening our intelligence and converting it into artificial intelligence with no value. Carr’s theory is un-logical because it is based on presumptions that overgeneralize the role that online tools like google play on our lives, based on the experiences and opinions of a few. By ignoring the complexities of these tools and the numerous features they have to offer which help enable us to expand our way of thinking and analyzing information, Carr incorrectly assumes that because the amount of information we are gathering and attaining from online apparatuses like google, that we are becoming hollow computer like entities with little to no intelligence.

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

Technology can help us find answers in a matter of a few seconds. In the article is “Why Google Isn’t Making us Stupid … or Smart” Chad Wellmon briefly explains how the internet is not helping us get any smarter or any stupider. We are just not learning anything and we just find results. “Digital technologies, claim the most optimistic among us, will deliver a universal knowledge that will make us smarter and ultimately liberate us” (Wellmon 68). Wellmon is try to explain to us that the Internet will help us in looking up things that we might want to know. We can learn new things just by a quick search. You can look up anything on the internet and you will find answers from all over the world. Therefore, you can learn anything you want about the world. Without Google we probably would have had still been stuck in the stone ages. “Likewise, to suggest that Google is making us stupid is to ignore the historical fact that over time technologies have had an effect on how we think, but in ways that are much more complex and not at all reducible to simple statement like ‘Google is making us stupid’ (Wellmon 69). This quote is telling us how we can learn anything we want thanks to the internet because all we have to do is search something and millions of results will show up at the tip of our fingertips. With this technology we have had made great discoveries around the world. Both the internet and technology is beneficial to every single one of us nowadays because we all use it on a daily basis, either to talk to people or to research for an

Nicholas Carr argues in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that the internet is changing the way we think and work for the worst by reducing our ability to concentrate on books, and long articles. Google is reshaping our brain, we have become accustom to skimming through headline and jumping from one article to the next without completing the first. The internet is altering our learning by giving us access multiple distraction such as emails, social media, and advertisements all these factors contributing to our lack of concentration when attempting to absorb information.

Over the course of years technology has expanded tremendously. In the beginning being in the library trying to look up information was the norm. Now in the 20th century everything is literally at our fingertips. Google has become a necessity for many people. For example, if a computer came without google or and other search engine would a person still buy it. Would they be willing to go and take the time to do research elsewhere? Is the dependency of google and the internet in general affecting our everyday thinking and how we run our lives? Nicholas Carr and a few others questioned this theory.

This day in age, technology is more present in our lives than it’s ever been. Every day we constantly check our phones, emails, tablets, and even smart watches. These devices have opened doors that we previously didn't even know existed. They are outlets to unlimited knowledge from all over the world. Although many people, including me, have grown up with these commodities, they are still extremely new. Home computers have only been mainstream for 20 years or so, while smartphones have only been mainstream for about 5 years! What all this leads itself to, is that we are just now able to observe the way this new technology and instant access to knowledge can affect our brain. Author, Nicholas Carr, believes that the world’s largest search engine, Google, has molded our brains to be incapable of deep thought, and that it also even makes us stupid.

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.

When we need to look for a definition of a word, where do we go? Google. When we want to search for more details about a breaking news that just came out on television, where do we go? Google. Whether it is for school or work, the main source that people rely on to get enough information is Google. Nicholas Carr, the writer of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” claims that the internet has been detrimental for human beings by the way they process information into their brains, their own way of thinking, and creating negative effects upon concentration. Carr uses plenty of different methods to prove his point such as, playing the audience’s emotions while using anecdotes, sharing his observations from his own perspective and using research. He believes that everyone should be skeptical of the internet because of the way it might be shaping the way we think. A comparison between the past and the present are is told to let the readers know how it changed not only him, but others as well.

Nicholas Carrs article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” makes points that I agree with, although I find his sources to be questionable. The article discusses the effects that the Internet may be having on our ability to focus, the difference in knowledge that we now have, and our reliance on the Internet. The points that are made throughout Carrs article are very thought provoking but his sources make them seem invaluable.

In the July-August 2008 Atlantic magazine, Nicholas Carr published "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google). In this article Nicolas Carr argues that the internet is changing how one thinks, and how it is causing a bad effect on one’s brain. I have to disagree. Although the internet is constantly changing, it helps in a positive way. Firstly, google has become a great resource for educational purposes. Secondly, the internet has become a great resource for intercultural experiences. Due to the general population spending most of their time on computer’s and smart phones, this information is accessible to us whenever needed.