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.
Writer, Nicolas Carr, in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, expresses the search engine Google is effecting the human mind. Carr’s purpose is to covey his idea that the web changes the way humans think. He creates a pessimistic tone to his audience that spending a lot of time on the internet is bad for the mind. I don’t believe Carr made an effective argument on this article because of the tone he used, the references he provided, and how the article was laid out. Carr begins his article to the readers by acknowledging the web is messing with his brain and he is not thinking the way he used to.
In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid” (2008), Nicholas Carr argues that the use of the internet has affected human beings to process information. For example, reading in front of a screen and reading a printed book is not the same thing. Carr supports his assertion by his own and others experiences reading and searching information online and viewing how it has negatively shaped their ability to read long texts. He states that he cannot concentrate reading a long piece for a certain amount of time without losing focus. His purpose is to is to warn the internet and technology users of the adverse mental effects that these devices have on individuals.
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.
In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr clearly states his thesis and the idea that not only is google changing the way we as humans think, read, and write, but all of technology is affecting us in our everyday lives. The internet sources such as Google are created to find information fast and easy for users. Google does all the searching and hard work of having to read through huge articles. We are humans have it easy now, we no longer have to do all the reading and digging around of endless articles and papers.
In, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (2008), Nicholas Carr maintains that the advent of the Internet produced a shallow generation of information consumers who lack the ability to deeply engage with a text and think critically about it. Carr supports his claim by drawing on numerous personal and historical anecdotes and one scientific study. The purpose of Carr’s article is to open dialogue about the potentially adverse effects the Internet could have human cognitive processes to allow individuals to begin to question the impact that the Internet is having on their lives. Carr establishes an informal, causal relationship with the audience. The audience of The Atlantic is generally well-educated, upper-middle class individuals who are likely approaching the article with a relaxed, non-critical lens (most likely embracing the article as a form of “think piece”).
Being that Carr titled his work, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", why does he think that it is only Googles fault? Technology is growing every single day and we are the ones creating it and changing the way we do things. Carr claims that his "concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages... deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle"(735). I agree that this happens to a lot of people, it even happened to me reading his article.
In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” written by Nicholas Carr, it talked about how Google and other technologies are changing the way we think and process information. This article starts out by talking about an instance where a person was almost killed by an artificial brain (Carr 731). The author talks about how over the years he believes that someone is changing his brain and the way that he thinks. The author gives examples of this by telling how he used to be able to read a long passage and keep attention to it but now he can’t keep focus for more than a few sentences (Carr 731).
Macy Sadler Mrs. Woodward APEL: Period 4 5 February 2017 Quality Non-Fiction and the Internet How often do you log on, scroll through, post, or “like” something on the internet and is that time used on the Web interfering with your cognitive abilities? Do credibility and sentence style make Nicholas Carr’s article a reliable source to reference and believe? Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, is full of irony, persona, and concrete examples all to help the reader understand or even change their outlook on the internet and how it affects our daily lives. Nicholas Carr is an American non-fiction writer who was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, and was awarded the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual
Nicholas Carr is a writer that has expanded his writing to books, periodical and even has a blog at roughttype.com; his writing focus is about technology and culture. He addressed the issue of how technology can be a great and awful thing to use at the same time in his essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr made an ongoing debate where technology is making people stupid because they are spending a lot of time researching and this is causing people considerate less while using the reading skill but at the same time technology saves times, can expand more on the topic, find any information etc. With regards “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
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 his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Nicholas Carr expresses his view on technology. He touches on ideas about how technology has evolved and how it changes how humans view the world. He makes the points that technology is widely accessible and frequently used. Carr shows how technology changed the style of earlier writers’ pieces. Carr believes that how the earlier writers wrote contributed to the style of their works.
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 Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid” I disagree that his use of support doesn’t work to make his point in this essay because it is too biased. Carr’s article shows a lot of support to his hate towards the internet by quoting himself along with his other fellow writers who are a part of an older generation like Carr himself and only includes one study from University College London. Carr mainly focuses on his anecdotes to help support his essay which really doesn’t give the audience actual information, although he makes a compelling point that Google or the internet itself is making us stupid, but what Carr has not included was any evidence about the good parts about the internet. What Carr was lacking in his essay was that
Technology is everywhere in today’s world and it is rapidly evolving. As technology evolves, so does the society using it. Technology is negatively affecting the way we read, write, and live. In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr focuses on how the introduction of newer ease of access technologies has changed the way we read, write, and even think. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr discusses the remapping of people’s brains upon the release of new technologies.
