Are Our Kids Turning Into Robots And Losing Out On Their Childhood?

Although its intention was to nourish our minds with an instant unlimited source of valuable information, the internet has caused some people to lose their appreciation for long texts and their ability to concentrate. Within the essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, the author feels that someone has been tinkering with his brain and that he can no longer enjoy reading a book of any length because he cannot sustain concentration on the book (Carr 1). This is a result of the fact that when people use the internet to find information, they habituate themselves to skim along the lines to quickly allocate their answers and once they have gotten what they needed, they close the browser without any further analysis of the information.

Nicholas Carr’s article is directed to an audience that should realize Google and today’s technologies are hindering our societal progress. Carr proposes that reading online is less thought provoking than reading an actual book. In his opinion the Internet was created to distract us, therefore, changing the way we think. Carr suggest that the value of reading online is associated with efficiency and information gathering rather than knowledge and understanding. To support his claim he references blogger, Scott Karp, who admits to having stopped reading books all together. Karp states that his reason for reading online is “I’m just seeking convenience.” (511) Carr goes on to argue that we read online because we feel the need to be efficient.

“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

In his Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr contends that the overload of information is “chipping away his capacity for concentration and contemplation”(315). He admits with easy accessibility of information online, the process of research has became much simpler(Carr 315). Yet such benefit comes with a cost. Our brains are “rewired” as the cost of such convenience(Carr 316). As the result, “we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s...but it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking”(Carr 317). Carr argues the forming of such habits can prevent us from deep reading and thinking. In fact, he provides may evidences in the

As the internet offers us the benefits of quick and easy knowledge, it is affecting the brain’s capacity to read longer articles and books. Carr starts Is Google Making Us Stupid with the closing scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when Dave taking apart the memory circuits that control HAL, the artificial brain of the ship. Carr feels the time he spends online is rewiring his brain. He is no longer able to concentrate long enough to read more than a few paragraphs. Even though the internet is useful, it seems to be changing the way our brain takes in information. He feels as though this brain wants to take information in the same way the internet disperses it: in

The article The Death of Reading is Threatening the Soul by Philip Yancey focuses on how many people are no longer “deep reading” and instead are reading “fewer of the [types] of books that require hard work” (Yancey 1). This is because the brain experiences a dopamine rush that occurs “when we learn something quick and new” (Yancey 2). Yancey agrees with many other intelligent, well-known people who stress the need to read many books or book pages daily. He adds that they acknowledge that it’s “beyond reach for [everyone] but [a] few people” so there’s no reason not to partake in the goal, especially since it is extremely beneficial (Yancey 3). Yancey describes reading lots of books has helped unleash his creativity and diminish his writer’s

Nicholas Carr, Harvard alumni and member of Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors, questioned the effects of search engines on our minds in his article to The Atlantic entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” claiming that the use of search engines causes a loss of the ability to deeply read and as therefore causes our minds to lose the ability to process information. He used personal stories to depict the apparent change in his and others ' minds from having the ability to "read deeply," to habitually skimming over the text in an effort to hastily extract information. Specifically targeting the leaders of the Google search engine - whom he said believe that, "Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed," - he related several causal reasons as to why the engines affect our minds negatively. He used a study on online research habits from the University College London to stress the point that people conducting research tend to read "no more than one or two pages of an article or book

Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Online article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” discusses how the use of the computer affects our thought process. Carr starts out talking about his own experience as a writer and how he felt like “something had been tinkering with his brain, remapping his neural circuitry and reprogramming his memory”. Since starting to use the Internet his research techniques have changed. Carr said before he would immerse himself in books, lengthy articles and long stretches of prose allowing his “mind to get caught up in the narrative or the arguments”(July/August 2008, Atlantic Monthly). Today Carr has found that “his concentration drifts away from the text after several pages and he struggles to get

The internet is our conduit for accessing a wide variety of information. In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr discusses how the use of the internet affects our thought process in being unable to focus on books or longer pieces of writing. The author feels that “someone, or something, has been tinkering with [his] brain” over the past few years (Carr 731). While he was easily able to delve into books and longer articles, Carr noticed a change in his research techniques after starting to use the internet. He found that his “concentration often [started] to drift after two or three pages” and it was a struggle to go back to the text (Carr 732). His assertion is that the neural circuits in his brain have changed as a

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” effectively adapts to its audience by creating a worrisome and disturbing tone. The tone helps this article, as it satisfies a worrisome attitude because it forces its readers to feel scared that the internet is hurting them. Furthermore, the author uses examples within his article that are meant only for those who use the internet and are-- rather, were-- avid readers. Specifically, he uses a testimony within his writing to express the disturbing fact that people are finding it harder to read, “Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether” (Carr 2). This sets the audience to be people like Karp: smart, once were dedicated readers and internet users. This is effective because reading is essential for day-to-day life and no one wants to lose this skill. This is a prime example of Carr using fear to appeal to his audience.

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.

Whatever happened to everyday bike rides through the ‘old road’ with friends during summer? Playing in the mud and getting dirty, swimming in river banks and lakes, having water fights with water balloons and bottles, drinking cold homemade lemonade and sitting on the edge of the road eating 50c ice blocks as the days got heated? These are just a few of the many fun activities I did as a young child from the ages of 6/7 until the age of 13, when I was introduced to my cellphone. They are also things which have now become rare, boring and have been made a second option in the minds of the generation of today. Kids these days have dropped using their imaginations, going on adventures and

Carr identifies how reading a book is different from reading online because when you read online, you don’t think deeply about what it is you’re reading, and you don’t have to concentrate nearly as much. Carr also mentions that the Internet is something people find themselves going to more often than books because it is more time efficient.

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

Nowadays, there are thousands of books available free on the Internet, and people find them easy to read the book online instead of getting the hard copy of the book. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr explains that the online readings make it becomes difficult for us to pay full attention to the reading “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing”(7). For example, when I have to read the articles from the Internet for my research papers or class assignments, I always have hard time focus on the reading because I easily get distracted by the ads shown on the pages. I start paying attention to the ads instead of understanding and absorb the information. Carr also states that “For some people, the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even little silly- like sewing your own shirts or butchering your own meat”(8). In these days, people find it boring to read books, especially young adults, they think it is a waste of time to read books when they can get the short versions of reading from the Internet instead of reading a page to