Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was published in an 2008 July/August issue of the Atlantic, argues a personal story of how deep reading for him has become difficult because of the distractions of the internet. Carr uses both personal experiences and the testimonies of others to argue that media is impacting the process of thought. Carr communicated with two other bloggers, Scott Karp and Bruce Friedman, and understands that his inability of not being able to deep read due to media alternating his thought, is shared by others too. A five-year research program conducted by scholars at the University College London observed the documents of computer logs and claimed that people are now beginning to skim or “power browse” from article to article instead of the reading in the traditional sense. Carr also admires

Carr describes the way our brains have changed as a consequence of using media. He later reports that when new or improved technology enters our lives, we begin to take on the qualities of those technologies, because it changes our “intellectual technologies”. He also uses the analogy of a clock, presenting the idea that we eat, work, sleep, and rise based on what time of day it is, instead of listening to our own senses. Carr then uses the claim from a 1936 British mathematician named Alan Turing that computing systems are subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies such as our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and our television. Likewise, he explains how the internet assumes what we are thinking and injects its context with hyperlinks, blinking ads, headlines, and other propaganda. Carr talks about the effects of Google by stating its company mission; “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”by becoming the “perfect search engine” and understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you