Is Google changing the way we think?

“Is Google Making Us Stupid? ” In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid? ,” Nicholas Carr implies that he notices that something is causing his brain to change. He realizes that he is not thinking the way he used to think, especially during reading. While reading in the past, he explains how he would be able to engage in long articles or books, but now finds his concentration drifting away after just a couple of pages. He began to realize these differences since he has started utilizing the internet.

Carr aims to convince his readers that our brains are trying to move at the same rates as the internet, skimming rather than completely soaking in new information. The internet is creating a new method of learning, much different from the traditional book or printed way of learning. Carr supports his belief by describing how intellectual activities are being replaced by technology, the development of the “one best method”, and Google’s motive to make the internet more accessible.

Carr begins his essay with the example of Friedrich Nietzsche and his story of the typewriter. Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer, and classical philologist. He suffered from dementia after becoming paralyzed from a stroke. Losing his ability to write by hand, Nietzsche bought a typewriter and was able to write again. Carr uses him as an example because it showed how even though using the typewriter efficiently allowed him to write again, it changed the form and skill of his writing.

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Nietzsche was reprogrammed, but this time with a lesser software. This example shows that Carr is clever and witty with his comparisons. He provides another example that timekeeping instruments are taking place of our biological clock and people are relying on the clock rather than their own senses. This example corresponds with Carr’s belief that intellectual activities are being replaced by technology, or being reprogrammed. Following his idea of reprogramming, Carr explains the development of the “one best method” created by Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Taylor used this method to determine how each worker can use his time wisely enough to get their job done in the shortest amount of time. This example foreshadows another example that Carr uses later in his essay. This system that Taylor created directly relates to the structure of the internet today. It is apparent to the reader that internet programmers are trying to find the “one best method” to make all the information that one person could need as accessible as possible, in the quickest manner. Google is the internet at it’s finest.

The final point that Carr discusses is Google’s effort to try to make the internet as accessible as possible because the faster we can use it, the faster they can market information that appeals to us individually. This is how Carr uses Taylor’s system to support the topic that is at issue today. Carr explains how the co-founders of Google are pushing to make their search engine into an artificial intelligence. This addition in the paper intrigues the reader, making them curious about how far this will actually go.

The point that Carr is trying to get across is that the skepticism on the development of writing and the invention of the printer, differs from the skepticism that we have today about the internet. Reading and writing causes our knowledge to expand into detail, while the internet causes our knowledge to expand into topics. Due to the assumptions that browsing the internet makes it hard to demand your full concentration for long periods of time, people are starting to feel as if they are becoming stupid.

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