Nicholas Carr's Essay 'Is Google Making USupid'

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It is plain to see that Google is becoming more and more of an influential entity within our modern society. Google is a household name and what that means is that billions of individuals have access to innumerable amounts of information. Like all innovative things there are pros and there are cons- though at first glance some may be hard to uncover. In Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid” he implies that Google is not necessarily the innovation that we need as a species. That Google is slowly stupefying us into a society that soon won’t know how to think deeply and concentrate. Though Jamais Cascio rebuts in his essay “Get Smarter” that Google is not making us stupid but rather enhancing our evolutionary ability to become smarter …show more content…
He also states that this skimming is causing the large majority of people to stop reading traditionally completely. In agreement with Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain , Carr too believes that “we are how we read” and that this skim reading and bouncing around on hyperlinks is causing the average individual to lose their capacity for deeper reading and thinking. Carr also argues that the gains Google makes from gathering information on people skimming the internet is incentive for them to want people to think distracted; Carr states that “the last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.” Yet Carr made it perfectly clear that he was not entirely anti-Google. He made it a point to state that he is just a skeptic. Just as there were skeptics of the written word, the printing press and of every technological advancement. The moral of “Is Google Making Us Stupid” is that there is too many uncalculated risks with relying solely upon Google and the internet- and that we as a people must make it a priority to ensure we think deeply and critically and thus we must read deeply without relying upon
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Nicholas Carr's Essay 'Is Google Making USupid?'

Why do we use Google so emphatically as we do? It’s because we seek for knowledge and understanding of topics that are uncommon to us. Nicholas Carr's essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" is a reflection of the negative influences which Google and the Internet have on how we connect with the world and one another. Carr seems to take this personally and how it has been a "godsend" to him as a writer. While condemning it for its conscious-like powers, "I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or…

Words 1124 - Pages 5