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Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

648 Words3 Pages

Reading is harder, focusing is difficult, books are a thing of the past. In an intriguing article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” Nicolas Carr explains how the internet is affecting people’s cognitive ability to function. Since the creation of the internet, information has become more readily available, but at the cost of the human brains cognitive ability.
Carr states that artificial technologies have an effect on the brains cognitive ability because its causing us to change our habits for the artificial technology. He writes about Friedrich Nietzsche a writer “[who’s] vision was failing, [who couldn’t keep] his eyes focused on a page [without it] becom[ing] exhausting and painful” (Carr 3). “Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter – a Malling-Hansen …show more content…

He states how his own memory is being affected by the internet jumping from one page to the next. He says his reading habits that used to be natural for him have become struggles. Studies performed at the University College London suggest that people exhibit “a form of skimming activity” and “. . . read no more than one or two pages of an article or a book before they would bounce out to another site” (Carr 2). “We are not only what we read” . . . “We are how we read” (qtd. in Carr 2). The internet promotes a style of reading “that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else” (Carr 2) Maryanne Wolf stated that “when we read online . . . we tend to become “mere decoders of information”” (Carr 2). Reading is not natural for humans we turn the symbols into something we understand. “And the media [and] or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading [starts to shape] neural circuits inside our brains” (3). These circuits that are created by the internet is different than the circuits that were created from books and written …show more content…

Carr uses himself as an example because “[he] starts to drift after two or three pages” (Carr 1). Even being a writer his mind struggles to keep focused on a book, or something that is new to him. He also uses his friends as examples, stating that “many are having similar experiences” (Carr 2). A blogger Scott Karp, recently said how he has stopped reading altogether. Another blogger Bruce Friedman, said “[he has] almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print” (qtd. in Carr

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