Is google really making us stupid? Author Nicholas Carr fears that the internet “Google” is becoming a commodity. What does this mean and why is he concerned? As stated Carr feels that society uses google as commodity, suggesting that the internet was created to make browsing fast and profitable, and this later caused a lack of tolerance to read. Carr is concerned that our attention span and critical thinking skills are being ignored in the process.
“Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes”. Due to advancements in technology caused many of us to skim opposed to reading. Though this can be very convenient to the average person it also organizes poor reading habits. If we’re all
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When mentioning my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances, literary types, most of them- many say they’re having similar experiences”. Carr pinpoints how the internet has affected our brains externally when we’re not able to read extended pieces of material without easily getting distracted. As indicated within the text Carr, along with many of us are not the only ones who have struggled with a short attention span, other scholars such as Bruce Friedman has similar concerns. Friedman was one of many supporters of Carr’s conclusion, spending an extended length of time could change the way many of us read today. I do concuragree with Carr’s conclusion that the internet has lowered our capacity to think, let alone reading any text longer than a page would be considered too much to absorb from the average person.I often find myself agreeing with Carr’s belief, mainly because of how frequently I notice that I have spent a profuse amount most of my time hovering over my laptop skimming many topics, but unable to form a deeper understanding or relation to any of the topics without being distracted. As for many others who haves created this sense of “newer type of self-evolving” feeling pressed to overload enormous amounts of information from the
In his essay, he writes “once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (Nicholas Carr 227). He also states that as the internet becomes our primary source of information, we are distracted, and it begins to affect our ability, or at least our willingness, to read books and long pieces. In his piece, Carr refers to a 5-year study in the UK, which found that people visiting sites "exhibited 'a form of skimming activity, ' hopping from one source or site to another, and rarely returning to any source they 'd already visited. " Carr acknowledges that people read more because of the Web, but deplores that "our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged."
Nicholas Carr’s essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?” on the other hand is a very different approach to language, more specifically about the language used in relation to technology. Carr begins this essay with a personal observation that he is losing his ability to read for long periods of time. He claims that the internet is to blame for deterioration of attention people now experience when reading. This is because people are developing a new way of reading in which Freidman refers to as “skimming”(Carr) that allowing them to hastily read things without actually taking in the semantic meaning.
In “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr argues that Google is deteriorating the human mind. He mentions that people no longer want or even need to deeply read information and retain it because the particular information that they are looking for can just be Googled. In fact, he argues against this by stating that everything is not available on Google, and things that are available on Google are not necessarily true. Another con of this, he states, is that it is extremely difficult to read off of a computer screen. Carr argues that people’s brains are not programmed to read something in depth if it is off of a computer or phone screen.
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”).
By Carr using the internet so much it has had a role on his ability to think and also his reading. By doing so much online and everything is easily accessible you don’t have to do much research and it hurts your mind. Carr states that he “zips along the surface like a guy on a jet ski”. By him saying this it shows that he don’t do a lot of in-depth reading and just skims the surface and get the easily accessible information. This not only happens with carr, this happens with everyone that uses the web a lot.
As we look all around us, we begin to become aware of the many different technologies that are in the world today. The different technologies started not very long ago, however they have advanced very quickly to please the new generations. The older generation that has grown up without technology is having to quickly adjust to the new world. The technologies could be shaping our minds in ways that we are not aware of or in ways that we don't take the time to actually think about. As technology is changing and evolving for the worst, so are our minds.
Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University worries that a style of reading that puts “efficiency and immediacy; above all else is weakening internet users capacity for deep reading” (Carr 287). Never has the internet has had such a huge influence over society’s thoughts as it does
We Owe Our Diplomas to Google Have our brains become robots due to Google? From my own experience, when I need an answer to anything Google is my first place to go. In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr discusses, I agree with the points in his article. The ways people read and write today are affected by the Internet, as well as, the way people think, learn and absorb information.
Since the of creation the internet, we now work between the realms of technology and reality, in which indulge our minds into on a daily basis. Nicolas Carr, the author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” tries to reveal to society that although the use of the internet has simplified multiple factors of our daily life, the complete indulgence of our attention in the internet is causing our once information thirsty minds to become completely uninterested altogether. Our minds are becoming simple and confined shells that can no longer think on their own, create their own ideas, or even interpret meanings without the help from the internet. I strongly agree with Nicolas Carr’s thoughts on how the internet has practically spoiled our brains to the
The constant stimulation of fast cars, music, and TV also caused the population to lose interest in reading, they don’t have the attention span to do it. The ideas of a
Juxtaposing with writers last comments he mentions bloggers like Scott Karp and Bruce Friedman who were once avid readers and now have completely lost their ability to concentrate and contemplate the long articles they read. Carr also asserts that only anecdotes don’t prove anything. To prove his point he examines the study done by scholars from University of London which concludes that people who use computer logs to research shows signs of skimming rather than depth reading.
The rise of the technological age has brought to pass the downfall of mindful and comprehensive reading. At least this is what Nicholas Carr believes, as stated in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. He argues that because of the golden age of computers, in depth reading no longer occurs to the extent that it once did. According to Carr, people now simply skim and skip over articles instead of actually reading them in depth. Carr constructs his credibility by having a prestigious background, and citing academic sources.
Rhetorical Analysis of Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid? We are at a time where technology is widespread; it has become a part of our everyday life leading to advantages and disadvantages. Technology nowadays has become the most important topic to discuss and everyone has developed their own unique opinion. In Nicholas Carr’s article published in 2008, “Is Google Making Us Stupid” he argues that as technology progresses people’s mentality changes.
The Influence of Technology In the essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr argues that utilization of the internet has an adverse effect on our way of thinking and functioning in everyday life. Whether it be reading a newspaper, or scrolling through Facebook, internet media has forever stamped its name in our existence. Carr explains to us that the internet is a tool used every single day in today’s society, but also makes most of us complacent with the ease of having the world at our fingertips.
According to this statement the readers can conclude that the main reason for reading concentration disturbance is the internet. In terms of the scientific research, the article provides the research by the British Library and U.K educational consortium which states “They found that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another rarely returning to any source they’d already visitied” (Carr, 2008). From this statement we can understand that there are numbers of attractive information piled on one page, people have a hard time choosing which one to read, resulting them to skim and jump to one another. From these couple examples, it can be concluded that the author of this essay is strongly attempting to convince the readers in his idea of internet disturbing people’s concentration. However, the essay itself is extremely biased, because of the fact that there is no information about benefits of using the internet and reading online.