Analysis of Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
Nicolas Carr is an author that focuses on technology and the effects of it’s dependency has on our social lives and the way we think. (Insert Nicholas Carr website.) He has written for several popular magazines on these subjects including “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the July/August 2008 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. He attempts to show us in his essay how our minds have changed due to the use of the Internet.
Summary
Nicholas Carr examines in an essay how digital technology affects our intelligence. Nicholas was educated at Dartmouth and Harvard and is a member of Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors. He has written a book name “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from
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Scott Karp, a blogger he follows, discusses the same idea as Carr that we do all our reading on the web because that’s the way we are programmed to think nowadays. This appeals to us using pathos but the only reason we listen to what they are discussing is because we figure that in the event that more than one person has the same idea then it has to be right. It a majority rules situation.
He uses the resource of Maryanne Wolf to create a backing ground for his reasoning that, “We are not only what we read, we are how we read.” Since his doesn’t have solid scientific or statistical reasoning he has to use the credibility of other authors, psychologists, and credible authorities for the basis of his argument. Lastly, he establishes his credibility by means of identifying himself as a writer starting in the third paragraph of his essay. He explains how he used to be able to read long sections of prose but now struggles to get past a few paragraphs. He used to go through books of research to find an idea for his writing and now it’s so easy to simply google the information we are looking for we don’t have to exercise our patience and concentration to find