Analysis Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

A Deeper Understanding of Technology

Technology advances everyday around the world. From the nerd’s favorite Microsoft Windows to the geek’s beloved Apple, we have entered a new age of technology - Internet and computing. But technology is a double edged sword; it can provide the user an enormous amount of resources in merely a second, but it can also devour one’s valuable time in just a blink of an eye from ads, popups, social media etc. And for a long time, it has become important to ask exactly how does the advance of technology affect modern society? Nicholas Carr, author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” argues that as we make the Internet our primary knowledge, it begins to devour our mental capability and diminish our learning experience.

Every new tool shapes the way we think, but does this change make us more intelligent? Carr claimed that his reading comprehension decreases the more he accesses the Internet. He supports his claim by admitting “the deep reading that used to come naturally had become a struggle” (Carr 314). He states that not only him, but his friends also, have the same problem of not being able to concentrate reading a book or lengthy articles and will often “get fidgety, lose the thread, [and] begin looking for something else to do” (Carr 314). Carr feels the time he spends online is rewiring his brain, unable to “think the way [he] used to think” (Carr 313). He explained that because of the net increase in resources, along with distractions such as ads, popups, social media etc., our brain’s learning process tends to subside and “exhibit a form of skimming activity,” skipping from one source to another and rarely hopping back to any previous source and take a moment “to interpret [the] text, to make the rich mental connection that form when we read deeply and without distraction” (Carr 317). Thompson noticed

Carr believes technology is slowly taking over human minds. He postulates that we “inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies” the more we rely on them. Carr echoes Lewis Mumford, author of “Technics and Civilization,” about how the invention of the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences” (Carr 320). However, he believes the invention of the clock helped to create men with scientific mind but also took away our sense of reason and judgment in “deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise,” and ultimately “we [stop] listening to our sense and [start] obeying the clock” (Carr 320). On the other hand, Thompson disagrees with Carr. He suggests humans have more controlling over machines. He supports his thought by referring to computers in chess that “the computer has no intuition at all, it analyzes the game using brute force [and] inspects the pieces currently on the board, then calculates all options” (Thompson 343). He points out that the way computer thinks is “fundamentally unhuman” and it is the player who runs the program and decides which moves to take (Thompson 343). After all, computers are just tools that we use to optimize accuracy and