In “Is Google Making Us Stupid” Nicholas Carr Provides his theory on how the internet is having a negative impact on the way people think and process with their brains. Carr states that, “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.” (409) Carr simply puts it out there that we as human beings spend way too much time on our computers, tablets, phones, and other handheld devices that seem to chip away at our brains. Spending a lot of time online seems to sometimes make us “zombie-like”. I for one have experienced this feeling after being online for quite some time. Carr also says that, “For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.” (409) The internet has made it so easy for a person to learn information, it’s just at the touch of fingertips. …show more content…
He goes onto say, “The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive. The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the internet, it is the networks reigning business model as well.” (414) The more we surf the web, view pages, and click on links the more information about us is being sent to the creators of the pages and networks. In this way the companies who own the search engines and networks gain money off of supplying the searcher with ads to click on. Carr ends his essay with a scene from the movie 2001 in which he states, “In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a
In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicolas Carr analyzes the dramatic affects that technologies have been having on our brains. The short summary, the Net is making us all mindless zombies in Carr’s mind, but he is not the only who feels that way. His long dragged out article is abundantly full of meaning examples, personal opinions, and hard facts on the drastic changes the Net has done to our brains. Carr starts his articles with the death of super computer, HAL, from the movie A Space Odyssey.
Every day new technology is advancing to makes its way into the world where it is used more efficiently. In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,”, Nicholas Carr claims that human are no longer able to focus on longer texts due to the rise of digital texts. Nicholas Carr includes strong evidences to support his statement; and through the usage of ethos and pathos, he is able to convince his readers that “the Net is becoming a universal medium” (Carr). Examples of Ethos are evident throughout the article making Carr’s argument deductively valid. Nicholas Carr is known for his reputation as someone who has written influential pieces and earning many awards for his accomplishments.
In Nicholas Carr’s writing, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” mentions multiple examples of why the internet and the simplicity of looking up and getting exactly what we were looking for are causing a drop in the way we think and the intelligence of our minds. Carr explains that he was once a huge reader and could comprehend ten to fifteen-page articles easily, but the directness of the internet had dulled his brain that he could not read a few paragraphs before he gave up and his mind started drifting off into the emptiness of his brain. Carr mentions that the Net is being the universal medium causing information that is read and learned go in one ear and out the other. Carr defends his positions by adding multiple examples showing that the Net
In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, he states that our minds are changing because of the time we spend online. He explains how not only does the media just supply the information to the users, it also morphs the thoughts that flow in people’s minds. Previous habits such as reading are slowly being affected, but only few have noticed the change. For instance, when surfing the web people skim the articles they’re reading and merely go from link to link. Carr talks about how easy it is to research and find things on the internet within minutes maybe even seconds.
Nicholas Carr claims his opinion on how computer and internet changed people’s way of thinking and going to turn people into machines in the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. He states current situation that we are in a Internet era and his mind is not going like before when we focused on deep reading. First of all, the new universal medium Net reshape our process of thought, from concentrating on one reading to skimming readings. Although we read more, we did not completely understand it and made a rich mental connection with it. He talks about how Google’s value contradict people’s healthy growth.
Nicholas Carr is a writer who writes in these kind of field: technology, business, and culture. Carr wrote this essay called, “Is Google Making us Stupid”; Carr fully explains how internet changes people’s thinking, a way of reading, and knowledge with rhetoric strategies. For logos, Carr thoroughly supports his arguments with great supporting points from credit sources. He explains how the internet affects us in reading. For pathos, he points out that human’s brain would work differently since we are using the internet widely comparing to the generation, whom lives without the internet.
In the article Nicholas Carr published called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Carr, 557) he explains how the Web and technology has impacted us. He also has written several books and articles about technology, business, and culture. (Carr, 556) I believe Nicholas has enough background information to be reliable for what is in his article.
They proposed the idea that people would be better off if they had a search engine connected or replaced with their brains, this is a notion of society’s brains being replaced with artificial intelligence. Aside from this unsettling notion, lets focus on how distracted society is, they are constantly being alerted of emails, app notifications, text messages, missed calls and the ever so important low battery alert. “The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow concentrated thought, it is in their economic interest to drive us to distraction”(Carr 291). That explains why internet users are constantly being bombarded by advertisements. When the brain deep reads it deep thinks, and the fact that even brilliant literature graduates are having a hard time concentrating on deep reading just proves the internet distractions are working in a negative
In the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is Doing to our Brains,” Nicholas Carr argues that the internet has altered, possibly not in a good way, how we use our cognitive mind. Today, most everyone is getting on to a computer and using the Net. It could be to do research, read an article, or just to scan the news in all its forms. What we don’t realize is that how we now read and research has weakened our minds cognitively.
In the article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr states in paragraph 4, “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” Many people have lost their ability to focus for long periods of time due to the internet being able to distract them so easily by use of pop-up ads and notifications. Carr also states in paragraph 5, “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.” Carr mentions several of his friends and their struggles with focusing on what they need to do. The use of the internet and the web is making people have trouble concentrating like they used to.
He says the internet has become a more accessible tool for us to use and we have taken advantage and it has started to affect the way we think. In the last paragraph Carr uses a quote from “Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”, I would say that this quote is an example of how we have become so reliant on technology because it has become more advanced to do things we should do on our own, which in turn makes us lazier but not necessarily more
One editor for the New York Times says that in order to conform to the new values they changed some pages to just include headlines instead of articles because of the “less efficient method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. ” Carr supports his claim that we will become information gatherers rather than knowledge gatherers by including an interview with Google’s founders in which they state that something optimal would happen “if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Carr uses this in an effort to make us believe that when we use the Internet we don’t learn but instead we just accumulate
In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicolas Carr he enlightens us on how he feels that the internet is changing the way we think and process information. He tells us that he has experienced this and feels the reprogramming of his brain the most when he reads. He also uses the feedback and evidence from his colleagues to show the change patterns in other people. Carr uses present examples of how he feels that the internet is changing the way we thinking but he adds examples of history for example the invention of the clock and the way it has altered our behaviors. The author also brings in scientific studies to prove that there are changes happening to us because of the internet.
The Influence of Technology In the essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr argues that utilization of the internet has an adverse effect on our way of thinking and functioning in everyday life. Whether it be reading a newspaper, or scrolling through Facebook, internet media has forever stamped its name in our existence. Carr explains to us that the internet is a tool used every single day in today’s society, but also makes most of us complacent with the ease of having the world at our fingertips.
The company does extensive research into the internet and the controversial artificial intelligence. Carr touches on this subject, He states, “The brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive,” in other words, the brain is too slow to keep up with the internet’s sheer speed and the mind cannot hope to match its amount of accessible information (52). It is shocking to think of the brain as a processor but in a way it is. It does the thinking through one hundred billion neurons that control every function of the body. A computer is just a pile of parts without its processor, and the human body is also rendered useless without the brain.