Comparing Is Google Making USupid, By Nicholas Carr And Clive Thompson

Technology will always be integrated into our lives so we must find the perfect balance between using our own intelligence and allowing technology to aid us. Nicholas Carr and Clive Thompson have opposing viewpoints on how technology is affecting human intelligence in their essay’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid” (2008) and “Smarter than you think: How Technology is changing our minds for the better” (2013) respectively. Both authors discuss past examples, present issues, and make predictions for the future. Carr shows how technology is decreasing our cognitive capacity by making comparisons to the past and offering predictions for the future. He also cites studies showing that humans today cannot read as deeply as our ancestors were able to,

Thompson looks at chess software while Carr focuses on deep reading and the Internet. Thompson’s addition of the chess analysis to his article shows the delicate balance between relying fully on technology and also using our own intelligence. He presents the scenario of a game of chess. First, a human plays a computer, and then the human and computer work together against an amateur. The results proved that a “chess grand master was good, a chess grand master playing with a laptop was better” but they could both be beaten by “relative newbies, if the amateurs were extremely skilled at integrating machine assistance.” (346) This example proves Thompson’s main point that there is a fine line between using our own brain and having technology aid us. One of Carr’s main supporting arguments is the fact that we, as humans, cannot read as deeply and effectively as our ancestors could and blames this mainly on the Internet. We have adapted skimming as an effective method of reading and use “power browsing” to avoid having to read long articles in a traditional sense (Carr 317). Carr wants us to see how this new form of reading is “a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else” and also how “the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction remain largely disengaged”

The three main central biases of today’s digital tools, as stated by Thompson, include an external memory that can hold more information than our brain, ease of finding and building connections and also technology encourages an excess of publishing and communication (349). Thompson believes that, as a whole, “we are shifting from a stance of rarely recording our ideas and the events of our lives to doing it habitually” (349). Even though technology is becoming a major part of our everyday lives, he does not want us to worry about technology taking over because “they’re a product of software and hardware, and can be easily altered or ended if the architects of today’s tools decide to regulate the tools” (350). Carr contradicts Thompson and believes technology will continue to have a negative effect on us. Carr ends his argument discussing how Google is one of the driving forces of the internet and shows how their willingness to provide “the perfect search engine” where “information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency” is having a negative effect on our minds and how we think (324). In Google’s eyes “the human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive” and Carr is afraid that we will become machinelike as if