Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

804 Words4 Pages

“My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.” Nicholas Carr, a noted blogger and Pulitzer Prize winner, claims this in his article, Is Google Making us Stupid? He argues that humanity has adapted to a different type of thinking that is affecting individuals. Specifically, he feels as though he can no longer progress through a book with having difficulties concentrating. Only a few pages at a time are all he can get through before he feels the need to do other work. His other major point of emphasis focuses on the internet as a giant library available freely at ones fingertips. Rather than having to spend time going through multiple books in a library, a researcher can cut that time in half with the amount of information available …show more content…

Bruce Friedman, a pathologist from the University of Michigan Medical School, says, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print….I can’t read War and Peace anymore…I’ve lost the ability to do that.” Instead of reading everything thoroughly, both researchers and individuals alike use a skimming technique, switching between sources quickly after reading a short part of it. Carr comes back and discusses how Google, motivated by a desire to use technology to solve problems, is a large reason for the mind morphing. Websites, like Google, are the reason people no longer exercise their memories and are becoming more forgetful. Society is becoming, “pancake people…spread wide and thin as we connect with the vast …show more content…

The issue is how. It may not be the same type of intelligence as an older generation, but it does not mean it is better or worse. For example, if you asked someone born in the 1920s to install an application on a cell phone, he/she may look at you with a blank stare. At the same time, if you ask someone born in 1999 if they wanted to roll a hoop with a stick you would get the same blank stare. Part of it is how individuals are raised in society. Not everyone has equal access to new technology, hindering them from potentially expanding their personal knowledge base. On top of that, technology moves and changes at such a rapid pace, even when you are up to date you are still essentially behind the times. As well, with each new piece of technology available comes a new way for society to contemplate reaching different

Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
977 Words | 4 Pages
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.
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Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
240 Words | 1 Pages
In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, the author suggests that modern technology is changing the way him and other people think. He argues that, in the past, it was much easier to engage in long readings. Now, he claims, reading is more challenging and people are more likely to skim a passage rather than fully absorb the information due to excessive use of the internet (313-314). Carr uses Friedrich Nietzsche’s relationship with his typewriter as an example to express that with every new technology, he warns, the human mind is vulnerable to a change in structure (319). Carr observes and suggests that the more people use and rely on computers, the more the human mind essentially becomes a form of artificial intelligence
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Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
142 Words | 1 Pages
In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (2008), the Pulitzer Prize finalist claims that the evolving age of technology, particularly the Internet, is damaging our cognitive attention. Carr initially presents his argument through a series of anecdotes that make the topic more understandable; thereafter, he backs up his main points with numerous different types of supportive evidence. Relatable stories of how the technologic advancements are causing a neural retrogression amongst the general population are provided in order to show what the Internet is really doing to our minds and hopefully inform us about the dangerous path we are on. Carr’s use of both academic and casual language entertains the audience with a complex and
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Rhetorical Analysis Of 'Is Google Making USupid?'
972 Words | 4 Pages
Rhetorical Analysis In the article “Is Google Making us Stupid?”, author Nicholas Carr expresses his idea that the internet is taking over society and our thinking process. Google is affecting our abilities to read books, longer articles, and even older writings. Carr believes that we have become so accustomed to the ways of the internet, and we are relying on Google 's ability to sort through the details for us so we don 't have to, in order to get the information we find necessary more efficiently. He finds that this process has become almost too handy, and that it is corrupting us from becoming better educated.
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Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
239 Words | 1 Pages
In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, he states that our minds are changing because of the time we spend online. He explains how not only does the media just supply the information to the users, it also morphs the thoughts that flow in people’s minds. Previous habits such as reading are slowly being affected, but only few have noticed the change. For instance, when surfing the web people skim the articles they’re reading and merely go from link to link. Carr talks about how easy it is to research and find things on the internet within minutes maybe even seconds.
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Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
330 Words | 2 Pages
In the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr expresses his concern that the internet could be negatively affecting the way people think. He begins to argue his point by explaining his own issues of not being able to immerse himself in a book like he could before. Carr then reveals his suspicion that it’s the internet’s fault, and supports that by comparing his own experience to others. Reading is a common hobby for most of the people Carr compares experiences with. Like Carr, they found it difficult to read longer pieces of writing, and some blame the internet as well.
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Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
580 Words | 3 Pages
For example, Carr states that the internet is affecting people's ability to concentrate: “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” (737). Carr validates his experience as a result of using the Internet to that of others: “When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances-literary types, most of them- many say they're having similar experiences” (737). He later provides the name of Bruce Friedman, a regular blogger, who has experienced similar difficulties. While Carr does provide the experiences of numerous other people to support his assumptions, further scientific investigations would help validate his
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Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
933 Words | 4 Pages
Nicolas Carr writes in his essay ‘a few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after'. Mr. Carr is telling us know that we no longer have to go to a library, spend hours going through card catalogs, or haul piles of books to the table in order to search through thousands of pages of text to find the information we are in search of. Instead, we have places online like Google, Yahoo, and Bing which allow us to sit back and literally, at our fingertips, have any and all information humanly possible on the ready. The days of going through an index in an encyclopedia book, sitting in front of a card catalog, or microfiche are days of the past, extinct if you will. Mr. Carr also writes 'my mind now expects to take in information the way the
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Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
780 Words | 4 Pages
In the narrative “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr, writer of technology and culture, argues that the instinctive animal that we are, are becoming more equivalent to robotic forms. To support this main idea, Carr suggest internet technology is exerting our animal like brains once processing in old media clock style, to the use of new technology which is awakening our “plastic like brains” to fold and shape not only in cognitive ways but also neurologically. Nicholas Carr emphasizes this through his own distractions while reading on the internet to researching how people’s adaptation and interactions with this technology is remapping their process of viewing text to their methodology of thought through notable personage’s experiences
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Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
316 Words | 2 Pages
1. Nicholas Carr’s argument in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” challenges Thompson’s argument which was that the internet is making people smarter by helping people improve their writing skills when they read other people’s work online. However, Carr believes with so much information available, the internet had changed our “mental habits” in a negative way. The internet has people using “ a form of skimming activity” which decreases how much people read to “no more than one or two pages of an article or book” (Carr 2) before they change to different site. Carr complicates Boyd’s view on how algorithms are filtering what people see on their screen and those who are not digitally literate would be clueless of this.
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Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
564 Words | 3 Pages
Humberto Luna David McDevitt English 100 16 October 2017 Midterm: Option One In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr he argues that the more and more that people start to rely on computers to “mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” (97). He claims that Google is making it hard for everyone to stay concentrated on finishing
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Summary Of Is Google Making USupid
490 Words | 2 Pages
Today, simple research is instant on sites such as ‘Google’ and ‘Bing’, just two of the many search engines. The author tells of others who are having this same problem consentrating while reading a traditional texts, like Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. He wrote earlier this year, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,”. Carr also speaks of Scott Karp, another blogger on the subject of social media who says he has stopped reading books altogether, when he himself used to love reading books. Karp is quotes saying he has no clue what happened, and the way he thinks must have
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Analysis Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
521 Words | 3 Pages
Every day the world is being introduced to new technology to make life easier for people. In the article, “Is google making us stupid”, author Nicholas Carr tells us about how he believes that the internet is making us stupid by changing the way our brain processes information. Carr begins to tell us how the web is causing these issues such as how he can no longer be occupied in a book for a long period of time. He then starts to talk about how his whole life is surrounded by the internet and that is to blame for the problem he has with being able to stay focused while reading; but he also talks about how at the same time the internet benefited him so much because he is a writer. When reading this article, you can see that Carr uses a lot of
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Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr
275 Words | 2 Pages
In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr argues that Internet changes how we think and act. First, he provides a personal example on how he cannot focus on reading for more than a few pages because Google has made him more efficient in doing research by going online rather than grinding through long readings. Then, Carr presents another example on a blogger, Brue Friedman, who also admits that he lost his ability to read long text after search engine became popular. Furthermore, Carr expresses his idea by using an historical example. Friedrich Nietzsche, who bought a typewriter in the late 1800s, changed his style of writing once he got familiar with the typewriter.
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Rhetorical Analysis Of Is Google Making USupid
1311 Words | 6 Pages
“For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. ”(736) He then goes on about how finding what you need used to require days and now can be done in just a few minutes. He then goes into saying that if he’s not working he finds himself reading and writing emails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos, and listening to podcasts. Even myself I can say that I spend most of my time on my phone or playing a
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Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr