Summary: “Is Google Making Us Stupid”

The text, “Is Google making Us Stupid” written by Nicholas Carr, describes technology and the reality of Google in our society. Carr says that “research that once required days in…periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes”. This implies how useful the internet is to him as a writer. He calls the internet “a godsend” and admits that his free time is spent on the web. Carr then goes onto point out the flaws in the internet and how great the impact is on our reading habits. He claims that “the more [we] use the Web, the more [we] have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing”. A study done by the University College London focused on “the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites” and revealed that there was a “form of skimming activity” going on. This means that usually “no more than one or two pages of an article or book “would be read before going to another site. Maryanne Wolf, a psychologist at Tufts University describes our style of reading on the internet as one that “puts ‘efficiency’ and ‘immediacy’ above all else”. She claims that it “may be weakening our capacity for...deep reading that emerged when [the printing press] was invented”. Although the title of the article makes the reader assume that the main focus would be Google, it is not mentioned until the conclusion of the article. Nicholas Carr states Google’s mission statement as wanting to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” Although this mission statement seems harmless, Carr claims that Google views information as “a kind of commodity” and “a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency”. Carr then concludes with stating that “the idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet it is the network’s reigning business model as well”. This implies that although Google claims that the “perfect search engine” is a positive thing for society; their eyes are set on the economic benefit rather than our own.

Of all the claims and assumptions that Carr made throughout this article, one clearly stood out to me as a reader. For some reason, I did not think of “the clock’s methodical ticking” as society-changing. Nor did I believe that it was as significant to our daily lives as it really is. Carr claims that this invention “helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man [but also took something away]”. That something was the basic idea of timekeeping. He states that “we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock”. When I read this, my mind was blown. Every day I follow a routine that I follow based on the clock; I wake up and go to classes at a certain time. Without the clock, my schedule would be thrown out the window and my life would most likely be turned upside-down.