Today the media is all around. It is hard for people to think for themselves without the media’s influence. People increasingly depend on the media, especially the Internet, to gain information. In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making us Stupid,” he argues that the Internet is decreasing our individual intelligence, changing our thought processes, and altering the way we take in and retain information. Since technology has been around, humans have been devoted to spend the majority of their time surfing the web or going from link to link. People today seem to only read a page or two in a book or article before they move on to the next website. Only reading one or two pages has a disadvantage, their concentration starts to drift after only two …show more content…
“The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions” (319). Carr uses the example of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was unable to write because of his declining eyesight. He learned to use a typewriter with his eyes closed (318). Nietzsche stated, “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts” when addressing how his writing style had changed (319). As we are more exposed to computers and the Internet, they influence our brains. Our thought processes, in short, begin to mirror the way a computer processes things in terms of efficiency and data processing. Today, it seems that almost everything is on or reliant upon the Internet. It is “becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV,” Carr says (321). The Internet interconnects everything we do in the media age. People are constantly bombarded with commercials and advertisements during their everyday life. Even reading the paper is a model of efficiency, as the Internet has forced publishers to concentrate information to keep people’s attention