Carr

Jen Humphreys
October 24, 2010
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Google
Recently, I was introduced to the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” written by Nicholas Carr.  Through Carr’s reading, I gained a new perspective over the internet and Google. Google’s ultimate goal is to deliver instant information on any question asked.  Their mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”   Although Google is currently still only a search engine, they espier to one day be an artificial intelligence.  If possible Google hopes to achieve the ability to connect their search engine or “artificial intelligence” to our brains.    It is no surprise that teachers struggle to hold the attention of their students, today’s students look for immediate responses.  Google has provided people with the ability to bounce from page to page “skimming” short articles hoping to find the answer they desire.  Teachers have even expressed that they no longer feel like teachers, but entertainers. Due to the fast pace of the web, people’s ability to focus and contemplate are lessening.  
​According to Carr, the internet is becoming a “universal medium.”  Due to this recent change, it is believed that people are reading more compared to 30 years ago when television was the medium of choice.  Although we may actually be reading more, what we are reading is very short.  People have a much more difficult time staying focused on long readings for long periods of time.  Even articles that are as short as four paragraphs are intimidating to people, so they just don’t read it.  Carr agrees when he writes people “scan short passages of text from many online sources.”  Basically what Carr is saying is that we continue to receive the information that we are looking for, but at a much more efficient and immediate response.  Carr states that “the Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection; transmission and manipulation of information and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”- The perfect algorithm-to carry out every mental movement what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work”.”   Carr has demonstrated the process of Google and what its ultimate intentions are.  
 ​You would think that the internet and Google are increasing our intellectual outlook, but Carr disagrees.  Literature majors who were once bookworms are even admitting that it’s rare for them to pick up a book.  What seems to be happening is the way we think is changing.  Carr himself writes, “…the boon comes at a price.  As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information.  They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.  And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.  My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”  What Carr is implying is we take exactly what the internet distributes without further contemplating.  Because the internet directs us to an answer at rapid speeds are concentration is decreasing.
​Technology as simple as a clock has even altered the way we think.  The clock, “decides when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.”  Carr demonstrates a strong example of how easily technology can change the way we think.  If Google continues to change their search engine into an artificial intelligence are society is doomed.  We will no longer be human with our own traits and characteristics, but instead robots who are all very similar.  Currently media and the internet play a huge impact on the way we live our lives.  With an artificial intelligence connected to my brain, I am no longer running my own life, someone else is.  An object as simple as a clock had a huge impact on peoples’ lives; I can’t imagine what the future of Google could do to our society.