Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

With a world full of technology, have humans become just walking vegetables? The symbolism is not referring to garden vegetables, but rather to the term referring to patients who are brain dead. Since the creation of the Internet, we have been able to access virtually any information at our fingertips, but at what cost? An article written by Nicholas Carr titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid” recognizes just that. Carr argues that humans have limited their ability in certain ways because of our complete and total access to everything that is on the internet. I agree with Carr’s writing, specifically that Google is making us stupid by shortening our attention spans, getting us severely distracted, and inhibiting our ability to write. Since the

Technology is everywhere, and where there is technology there are all different kinds of notifications and pop-ups. Carr elaborates, “The Internet, an immeasurably power computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV” (Carr, 592). At the core of all technology is the computer, where people search for information on Google and students such as myself write their papers. While writing my rough draft, I was bombarded with email and Facebook notifications. My phone kept ringing with text messages and notifications, probing myself to keep picking up my phone. With all of the technology around me, I am constantly getting distracted from the tasks I am currently working

Carr realizes this while talking about Friedrich Nietzsche and when he acquired his typewriter, saying “…the machine has a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic” (Carr, 591). After years of writing with pen and paper, the typewriter was able to change his style of writing even if he did not realize it himself. I can see this happening with myself. As a trial, I read a printed book for two hours and then worked on a part of my rough draft with a pen and paper. I found it easy to convey what I wanted to say and my thoughts were clearer. I then went on my computer and scrolled through my feed on Facebook and several other websites for two hours, and afterward I worked on another part of my rough draft using Microsoft Word. It was a bit harder to figure out what I was trying to say and throughout my time working my notifications still kept going off. I can conclude that technology and the Internet has impaired my mind like the typewriter impaired Nietzsche’s, with a different style of writing and a different