Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

Throughout the history, great changes have been taken place in our society. There is no doubt that progress of technology and science makes a huge contribution to our society. However, everything has its advantage and disadvantage, just like a coin has two sides. While science and technology advance human progress, but it also brings a lot of negative effects. In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, author Nicholas Carr states how the internet changes us in so many ways. Carr explains the internet has start to negatively impact our way of thinking, it brings distraction and lead us lost our concentration and also let us become impatient when reading a longer piece of article. Carr uses examples from history, his personal experience, and

He discusses people are not doing traditional reading anymore. “A form of skimming activity, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.” People only read the contents pages and abstracts online and they jump one page to another. Some of them may save an article, but they never go back to read it again. Due to the internet, people start to change their reading habits and they only want efficiency, I think it will make us lose the chance to gain new knowledge. Carr states these examples, can let readers easily relate themselves to this kind of situation, so more readers will support this

He states writer Nietzsche use typewriter to write, eventually his writing style changes and his works not as good as it used to be. Nietzsche himself also admit that “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Carr claims the invention of the clock makes our life become more organized, but it also takes away something. As Mumford described “The abstract framework of divided time became the point of reference for both action and thought”. Due to the invention of the clock, we don’t follow our feeling anymore, such as when to sleep, raise, work and eat. We start to listen to the clock. Carr also uses the example of a stopwatch. He tells a young man name Taylor who brought a stopwatch to a factory, and this young man starts research on time and work methods to bring up efficiency. Later he “Created a set of precise instructions.” Although this method brings up the efficiency, but it also makes workers feel they are like an automaton. I feel all the new inventions will always change our habit and thought and it is very hard to avoid the change. These examples can be very good support of his idea that invention of the internet can change us a lot in the negative ways, and helps his article a lot. He also shows to the readers, that he has pieces of evidence from the history, so it will be more persuasive, reliable and authentic than his personal experiences. Readers will also