Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In “Is Google Making Us Stupid” Nicholas Carr begins his argument by expressing his concerns about how he is not thinking like he used to. For example he states that he has trouble immersing himself in a book or long article, when this didn’t used to be the case. Now as he reads he starts to figet and eventually stops paying attention to the text that he was reading. Carr states “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski”. (1) Carr believes that the way that he learns things is different now because of his frequent use of the internet. Carr knows that he is not the only one that this is happening to he has friends who are developing the same problem that he has. One man even admits to not reading altogether. Carr appears to be extremely alarmed because he thinks that the internet is making him unable to read for long periods of time.

            As the article goes on Carr starts to talk about Google. Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” because they want to develop the “perfect search engine”. The creators, Sergey Brin and Larry Page want to create artificial intelligence on a larger scale and at the idea of this Carr seems to get angry. Carr becomes angry at the suggestion of artificial intelligence because the internet as it is today has already changed his life by making it hard for him to read long articles or books.

            I agree with Carr, the internet is changing the way we think and learn. However, I think that we are doing it to ourselves. It is our choice to use the internet to find information that we could just as easily find in a book. The internet is dumbing down the current generation and they are making themselves dumb by choice. The internet is a tool that you should use to your advantage but you should not exploit that tool.