Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

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Technology is advancing very rapidly, but that does not necessarily mean it is benefiting society. In the article, “ Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Nicholas Carr explores how the internet alters people’s mental abilities. Malcolm Gladwell writes an article titled, “ Small Change”, in which he draws attention to how the internet has changed the engagement of social activism. Carr’s argument that the internet alters mental abilities, changes thought processes, and destroys concentration, complicates Gladwell’s thesis that the internet loses the meaning of social activism, changes how activist are defined, and takes over activism on a social level. The arguments presented are similar but the outcomes of the internet vary between the two writers. …show more content…

“Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore” (Carr 32). The internet has taken a personal toll on Carr, in which he cannot even look at a long piece of writing, because it has become so unfamiliar to him. He has become accustomed to the internet, and therefore replaces his passion of reading. “But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is” (Gladwell 44). Gladwell strongly feels that the internet has created this loss of social activism in the world, in which the internet has redefined what protesting used to stand for. Protests during the civil rights movement, was a method for people to bring about change, but since the creation of the internet people use it as a way to replace protesting. Carr believes that the internet creates a loss of reading while Gladwell thinks it creates a loss of the meaning of social activism. Though they both can agree that the internet creates a loss, they see it as two different losses, in which Carr’s argument complicates

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