Is Google Making USupid, By Nicolas Carr

Living in the technology age our constant need for technology and the internet has changed everything about a person’s daily life. Technology has replaced the ability for deep, meaningful thought and even the need for face-to-face human interaction. Today people don’t have to put in a lot of work in order to find information they are looking for. They can find it easily at the touch of their fingers on the internet. They can even have relationships on the internet. They no longer have to meet someone in person and spend time with them. They can just find them on Facebook and then start messaging each other but never have to have actual contact with them. Even the way families interact is much different than it used to be. Families no longer sit down at the table and have actual conversations they just sit on their phones and essentially ignore each other.

Why would they because they no longer have to. Anything they need to find they can just look it up in just a few minutes. A lot of people know a little bit about a lot of things and in the essay “Is Google Making us Stupid”, by Nicolas Carr, Carr calls these type of people “pancake people”. He compares them to more complex thinking people of an older time. A time where the internet and the written word weren’t at the tip of their fingers. He called these people the “cathedral people” because they were more complex and stored a lot more knowledge. The cathedral people stored information in their brains and they had to remember it to tell to the next person. As where the pancake people don’t have to remember very much at all, they know a lot of things but not in much complexity because they don’t retain it so they don’t have existing knowledge to build on