'Is Google Making USupid?' By Nicholas Carr

In this day and age, almost every single person uses technology in some way. It has become a necessity for a human to survive. The pace of technological advances has immensely increased over the last few decades to ease our lives and provide us more opportunities. Though it is undeniable that technology has changed our lives, tech critics argue that the Internet and other related technological gadgets have a deleterious effect on the human brain performance. However, the new advancement of technology has brought us a new kind of intelligence making us smarter and has made complexity simpler than ever.

Stating Google has become so powerful that it can practically predict what one wants to find on the internet. In the end, Carr, is persuading people that to remain keen and intelligent they should always fall back on the “Traditional” ways to read, but at the same time it doesn’t hurt to skim an article to retain what is necessary. So, his message is that Google is not actually making people stupid, it is just making people forget the traditional sense of reading which is causing the lack of attention in today’s world compared to when there were no computers, internet, or Google. I feel the rapid changes of the digital era haven’t too much affected me. I grew up in an age where devices and communications were on an uproar.

One more thing that is often heard is that it is easier to forget things such as textbooks and notebooks. Textbooks are too heavy, as some students would say when really, our Chromebooks are just about the same weight as our textbooks. If we keep track of what we have to bring home and to school, in a planner, then it would be much easier for those who are not organized. When I was working on this project, I asked my brother why he likes online homework and he said that “it is easier for some people to type than writing.” I would agree that it is much faster to type than writing, but that is because we are online so much and are used to it. We need to practice writing more and our hands will get used to it.

What are the benefits of having technology and what has it done for us? Websites such as Google have helped us learn in a quicker and more efficient manner, letting us switch between tasks more quickly. Carr [says] in his article [that] Google [gives us instant access to more information, and this helps us to] become more productive thinkers (156). Now a day’s people would rather see a series of movies than read books. I think the reason for that is the movies give the same facts in a shorter time period; in other words,

I find that true because to me writing by hand helps me memorize what I wrote down more. I guess the fact that writing stuff by hand makes you memorize the stuff longer. When I do write my notes in laptop I tend to do write down the stuff fast so I don’t really memorize them. But, then again that is a good perk of writing stuff on your laptop. Like when your teacher asks you to take notes and you have little time typing your notes is faster.

Milton relied more on his computer and yet he found it difficult to find an ideal girl without the help of Joe. The prediction that Asimov had of computers having human characteristics that include thinking like humans and being our memory chips was right. One could truly say he was a medium in evaluation to what is happening in today’s society. Humans have lost the power to reason and technological devices have played a major role in killing common sense and human interactions. A day without a technological device for many will be tragic as people have organized and live their lives through their portable technological devices.

They just check their Facebook message or watching the television in the middle of doing homework because they can’t focus on a single task. Because many people believe multitasking is required ability to keep pace with rapid changes in modern trends, even though those kinds are originally different from each other, recent society tends to blur the distinctions between them. Particularly for students, they believe they are multitasking

One of Turkle’s arguments is that students tend to choose hyper attention over deep attention as their default. I agree with this idea; some students choose hyper attention, which makes it difficult for them to multitask and focus. As my ECE teacher told the class, students do better if they read the textbook before they come and refresh their memory in class because information is easier to absorb when students are doing just one thing instead of doing multiple things at once. During one of the math sections, I was busy copying down all the algebraic equations on the board, but I discovered that I could not process the method and algorithm in solving the problem even though I copied it all down. I felt as though I was just transferring the information on the board to my paper.

Brendesha Tynes article is about screen time being possibly both good and bad. She uses examples of anxiety and depression because of cyberbullying as a bad thing. On the other hand, there are studies that show possible links between video games and creativity in younger kids and also there are different programs that can come from the internet that help people, such as the example of the girl that was blind and how her classmates helped her with a code they produced (Tynes). This article is in stasis at the level of evaluation because Tines talks about the internet being both good and bad, and that it should be sought out in certain areas. Danah Boyd’s article was about how screen time wasn’t a bad thing, but a necessity for youths because they are trapped inside their own homes by overbearing parents.

A bit of both? Well, it’s not your fault because that’s exactly what half the world’s human population is coping with right now. For starters, Censorship is that omnipresent power which restricts contents on a webpage for being harmful, objectionable, obscene, ethnically provoking or unlawful by keeping a track of your account activity, your posts, your comments, uploads and pictures. Censorship works on many levels. For instance, we all use Google, don’t we?

While refuting Carr’s article, Steven Pinker makes a very good point and gives examples as to why Carr thinks that the internet is making us stupid. There will always be people that think a new idea or technology is destroying our so called society or world. For example, Pinker reminds us about “The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously”. Ironically, the same thing can be said about the internet.

Nowadays, the internet is the biggest marketing and media tool that people can use today. It can have various effects on people’s daily life ranging from bad to beneficial. In the essay “Is Google making us stupid” by Nicholas Carr writes about how internet usage in the 21st century is changing people’s reading habit and a cognitive concentration. Particularly, he emphasizes on Google’s role in this matter and its consequences on making people machine like. Carr also stated that the online reading largely contributes to people’s way of reading a book.

In the article “Is Google making us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, Carr proposes that technology is causing a negative effect on our brain. Carr believes that since he’s been on the internet a lot more in the past decade he notices that his mind can’t focus on books or essays anymore. Even bloggers, that Carr follows, are coming up with the same conclusion. Since internet access is so quick it’s changing how our minds work and that we are becoming depended on the internet for everything. Carr goes on to say how he thinks that as long as we rely on computers mediate our understanding of the world that our own intelligence will become mixed into artificial intelligence.

Gutenberg made knowledge more accessible to the population of Europe. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented Google they did not make interpreting knowledge less complex. Page and Brin made the knowledge more accessible to the population of the world. They did not create something that makes us lethargic and less intelligent they created something that makes us smarter and able to process tasks more efficiently. If we did not ask questions about the world we would not seek out the knowledge that is now right in front of us; “Today, there is enough information in the world for every person alive to be give three times as much that was held in Alexandria’s entire collection”(Leslie par 2).

" Is Google Making Us Stupid" By Nicholas Carr refers to the ways technology is negatively affecting our brain function. Carr starts his argument talking about how the internet is a resource we can use for almost anything. As a result, we are becoming more and more dependent on it for simple everyday tasks. Carr states that technology is a distraction and just a "shortcut". According to the article, technology is becoming more important than people.