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Summary Of Is Google Making USupid

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I am analyzing Nicholas Carr's essay titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", where he supports his message using the pathos associated with his use of allusions, anecdotes, testimonies, and powerful diction. In the beginning of his essay, Carr provides the reader with an allusion to Stanley Kubrick's "A Space Odyssey". This reference reads "'Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?' So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut... 'Dave, my mind is going,' HAL says, forlornly. 'I can feel it. I can feel it'" (Carr 1). Although this impactful quote could be considered an allusion, it is also an anecdote. In addition to this, powerful diction such as "pleads" and "fornlornly" is used to stir up emotions of sadness in the reader. …show more content…

All of these components add up to greatly increase the pathos present in Carr's essay. He ties this reference to the current state of the human population by claiming that we, too, are losing our minds. This puts the reader in the shoes of the computer, and it is a jarring realization. Furthermore, Carr uses a testimony from Bruce Friedman, a blogger who focuses on the use of computers in medicine. Friedman admits that "[he] can't read 'War and Peace' anymore... [he's] lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it" (Carr 3). Through the inclusion of this quote in his essay, Carr builds his pathos as he offers the reader a frighteningly relateable example of humans losing their ability to comprehend expansive texts. Phrases such as "lost the ability to" depict a vain struggle to regain his patience. Overall, this testimony proves that no humans- not even people well versed in writing- are out of the grasp of laziness.

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