Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Dwight Macdonald

Knowledge is power. But can knowing too much information damage you?
In “Reading and Thought”, an essay written by Dwight Macdonald, argues how individuals are too focused on obtaining knowledge that isn’t useful to them. Macdonald insists that people are too “well informed” (Macdonald 548) and such a trait impairs an individual’s ability to logically think. He speaks against the publisher of Time magazine, journalist Henry Luce, who believes Time illustrates functional curiosity. Which is a “kind of searching, hungry interest in what is happening everywhere” and “not of an idle desire to be entertained or amused, but of a solid conviction that the news intimately and vitally affects the lives of everyone now” (Macdonald 548). Dwight Macdonald

In the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid” written by Nicholas Carr, argues the destructive nature of convenience that search engines like Google provide. As a result of this easy access to information, individuals tend to rely on these media rather than utilizing their intelligence to educate themselves. Carr claims that the Internet has shortened his attention span, led to a loss of focus and how “deep reading..has become a struggle” for him (Carr 576). The Net deteriorates one’s “capacity for concentration and contemplation” (Carr 577) because it destroys a person’s ability to have functional curiosity, connecting it back to Macdonald. Dwight argued this concept of concentration in a comparison example between his generation and the 16th century’s ability to read. He asserts that an individual from that century would have spent roughly 2 days to understand a Time article whilst a modern person would have skimmed through facts only obtaining surface level knowledge. Therefore I believe there is a motivation behind the unavailability of information, to find that knowledge

In her Acknowledgements, Gloria addresses everyone in her border, outside of it, to those who never spoke to her and those who aren’t from either side of the border. She essentially writes this book for everyone. I believe this strongly correlates with Macdonald’s ideology that for functional curiosity to be functional, it has to help the individual function. Therefore, Anzaldúa speaks of her own borderland troubles, but eventually argues that borders can be an interference of many traits for anyone. She defines a border, not one that is literal as the US and Mexico border, but rather an internal significance that holds an individual back from their potential. Such meaning speaks to Macdonald’s argument that well-informed individuals have to participate in readings that benefit all aspects of their lives. Although I am not from either side of the borderlands, reading Gloria Anzaldúa’s book allowed me to understand my flaws and how I can better my surroundings. In the poem “To live in the borderlands”, from Anzaldúa’s book, she argues that in order to survive the borderlands, one must “be a crossroads” (Anzaldúa 195). That it is only through accepting every singular aspect of an individual’s life that will give an individual a successful satisfaction of