Brainless.com: Rhetorical Strategies in Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Do we depend on the Internet to answer all of our questions? Nicholas Carr, an American author, wrote “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” published in 2008 in The Atlantic, and he argues about the effects of the Internet on literacy, cognition, and culture. Carr begins his argument with the ending scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Carr believes that we depend on the Internet more than just looking up the answers in the book ourselves. He is trying to prove that our generation is consumed by the Internet. In addition to this, I feel his argument is effective because he builds credibility with personal facts, using statistics, and making emotional appeals throughout the essay. He gives many details and examples to backup and support his argument. Nicholas Carr gives himself credibility by stating that he knows what’s going on in his own mind, this is where he is uses ethos. “For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.”(736) He then goes on about how finding what you need used to require days and now can be done in just a few minutes. He then goes into saying that if he’s not working he finds himself reading and writing emails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos, and listening to podcasts. Even myself I can say that I spend most of my time on my phone or playing a