Is Google Making USupid Thesis

704 Words3 Pages

Article are getting shorter, and people are thinking about what they read less. As explained by Nicholas Carr in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, technology is impacting our thinking. Carr believes that people are not thinking deeply, and we have a much shorter attention span when it comes to information that we consume online. Although thought provoking, Carr’s article does not provide enough evidence to support his thesis.
Firstly, Carr does not not use clear statistics in order to prove his thesis. Many of the citations that Carr uses in his article are single instances of his peers experiences in decreasing attention span. These testimonials miss the mark because they are like minded writers or professors with little background information …show more content…

It is clear that people much younger than Mr. Carr, who is 59 years old, would not be able to relate to his article’s message because it is written about people who are much older than them. Many young adults would be willing to think, “Oh it’s just this old guy having memory or attention issues”, which is possible because younger adult perceive that they are in their prime. If Carr included citations of young people experiencing a lack of focus when trying to concentrate on a longer piece of reading, it would be more convincing to that audience. It is in the younger generation’s tendency to relate strongly to their peers to fit in. If a younger reader consumes this article he may think that since someone else my age is like this, maybe I am as well. As the article stands, it is too easy to shrug off as someone else’s …show more content…

He tries the explain the natural development of technology and how it is leading us to artificial intelligence, but in doing this he does not add into in his argument. The objective of companies like Google attempting to supplement our intelligence with artificial intelligence does not have any measurable outcome in the real world. The counterargument is trying to take something that he believes may happen in the future vs. something that he has explained to be experienced over time. While it is possible that he is trying to warn about the future to this problem, this argument does not supplement his argument that we are losing our attention span when it comes to long readings online. Carr is only deviated from what he is trying to convince the reader, and this only adds to the tangled mess that his arguments are in