"Is Google Making Us Stupid"

Google along with the Internet has changed the way humans think. Nicholas Carr sees Google as an "artificial intelligence." Google has created the ways for which humans can no longer read a book or contemplate one subject. Human minds know just seem to drift from one focus to another focus. Nicholas Carr states, "I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text." Carr argues in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" that he is no longer able to experience deep reading which he claims is an immediate cause of Google. Many of Carr's friends have backed up his reasoning telling him of their circumstances with the subject. Scott Karp, a blogger, questions what happened to the days when he used to be a voracious reader. Scholars from University College London conducted experiments in which they found people skimming over websites skipping from one website to the next. Nicholas Carr quotes Maryanne Wolf, a psychologist and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, who asserts "We are not only what we read. We are how we read." This reasoning backs Carr's opinion that our old cognition has been etched out by the existence of the Internet. Whether or not Google is truly affecting the way one thinks, everyone uses Google. If Carr's argument proves to be true then everyone is slowly adapting their minds to the fast and easy world of the Internet.

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

When was the last time that I sat down and engrossed myself in a lengthy novel? I remember as a child easily knocking off three books in a week. According to Nicholas Carr in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Carr feels a certain entity is "tinkering" and "reprogramming" his mind and the minds of millions. This thought is both frightening and terrifying revealing a glimpse into the future, a future where the human brain is no longer able to retain memory or concentrate on one subject. Typing in www.google.com and clicking the search button has become secondary nature to anyone with access to the Internet. Google eliminates the stress and work of having to search for hours upon hours in the library looking through countless periodicals. The advantages of finding an infinite amount of information using just one click are endless. However, Nicholas Carr sees Google as a destructive tool that shapes and morphs the neural circuitry in the brain. The ways one used to think have been changed. They have been altered and disfigured. They have been replaced by an "artificial intelligence." Are these new ways of thinking necessarily bad though? Humans may have never written books because they worried over whether our ways of thinking would dramatically change for the worse. The act of not writing books would have been a crime to humanity. Reading has sparked areas in the brain never imagined, broadening each person's intelligence. I feel Google has a lot to offer and only time will tell what the effects are on the human mind.