Nicholas Carr's 'Is Google Making USupid?'

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It is much easier to criticize new technology rather than appreciate it. Nicholas Carr, for instance, describes in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” how the influence of the Internet has driven people to exert less effort when reading. It is erroneous to make this assumption because a variety of other reasons could be at fault. Carr assumes the Internet is making people less intelligent; however, he is unsure, narrow-minded, and ignorant of the impact the Internet has made on more recent issues--thus rendering his argument void. Nicholas Carr, despite being a distinguished American writer, paints himself as an unconfident and unreliable narrator in his writing. This reflects negatively on the reader, who is unlikely to trust an author who is not even sure about his own argument. Carr expresses, “... yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism” (Carr 6). From this excerpt, Carr gives off the impression that he is unsure of himself and even invites the reader to dissent him. An author who sounds tenuous in his or her argument is an unreliable author. Carr also laments about his struggle to read for longer …show more content…
Carr writes, “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what’s going on. 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” (Carr 1). Nicholas Carr was forty-nine when he wrote “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”; it is not atypical for an middle-aged man to feel that his mental power is weakening. Aging comes with an abundance of complications, some medical and some societally-induced. A number of factors influence the decline of a human mind; to conclude that his issues with reading long-term is a result of the Internet and Google is an example of how narrow-minded and untrustworthy Carr
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