Analysis Of Nicholas Carr's Is Google Making USupid

The Internet we use today first started being developed in the late 1960's. In fact, the internet has gone from plain text and scattered underlined links to designed web pages filled with colors, videos, bolder typologies, and functionalities that users can easily access. Since 2008, the internet has even developed towards mobile devices. Contrary to Nicholas Carr’s argument in, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, that the internet is changing us in a negative way, it is actually changing for the better and to our advantage. Today, Google has made research and learning more efficient and readily available. In addition, communication with those in other countries or who speak other languages, is now made possible without a plane ticket or a human

The millennial generation knows and loves technology like the back of their hand. We have grown up in it. We aren’t a new species, but mutated to fit the conditions best for us. Google gives us access to ultimately anything and everything. Hundreds (even thousands) of results show up after a single search. In his essay, Carr includes some of Google’s goals, saying, “the more pieces of information we can access, and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we can become as thinkers” (744-745). Instead of spending hours searching through books and other concrete objects, we can skip the mess of fluttered papers and find the answers with a few clicks of a mouse. Everything from magazines and blogs, to research sites with statistics, lay within the palm of your hand. Youth are able to mold to the new techniques and habits because they have such open minds and are ready for new things all the

Carr references Richard Foreman‘s fear that we “risk turning into ‘pancake people’–spreading wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button” (748). But, the availability of the internet does not limit us to what we can know. Yes, while discovery can come by going deeper into the corners of a topic, it can also come from going wide and seeing various connections that others have never seen before. This is where our new information age offers the most opportunity for innovation and wisdom. As stated by blogger Carl Knerr, “Innovation comes from pulling together new ideas from existing information. Imagine if Albert Einstein’s brain had immediate access to all of the world’s data: What other connections/discoveries could he have identified?” (Computers, the Internet, and