Is Google Making Us Stupid?

1. The article written by Nicholas Carr claims that the overuse of the Internet in place of reading print is changing the way we think. In the past, we have taken the time to analyze, discuss and store information. Now, we spend our time memorizing quick bits of information from the Internet. The Internet provides us with everything we want, but with all of that it contributes to a large amount of distraction. The Internet continues to grow and it is slowly wiping out our interest to dive into a book or article. We are turning into machines searching for the website source to help us process information.

2. The websites we go to every day have made it much simpler for us to find information, so our tendency to search through a dictionary, newspaper or encyclopedia is diminishing. The Internet is slowly tearing us apart from deep thought, comprehension and reflection; we are becoming uninterested. The Internet is slowly rewiring our minds from thinking deep to quick memorization.

3. Literacy is defined almost the same thing, but there is a stronger danger in print, not speech. Literacy is defined as being able to think about and analyze print over a generous amount of time as opposed to skimming and article over a few minutes.

4/5. The Internet has changed the processes of thought and reading. We are prone to skip over the depth and the meaning now and just look at the surface structure. This pulls away from the depth of the writing and just brings one to conclude that the simple words are all that matter.

6/7. The author uses older changes in technology to demonstrate what people thought about changes similar to this and how they actually turned out such as the transition to mechanical clocks. He also brings up how changes in medium change the way we write and read just like how Nietzsche changed what he wrote when he changed how he wrote. And finally he brought up HAL and how it was more emotional, more human, than the actual humans because the actual humans lost the reasoning skills of deep thought. This evidence was very effective for the reason that it showed relevance throughout different situations and examples. It was different but it all helped prove a different part of the same point.

8. The overall answer to the “so what” question is that the Internet is frying our brains and it is leading us into a world of full technology where we are slowly losing our ability to find depth and true meaning. The more we rely on this technology, the more we begin to lose depth.