In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr writes about how he has a challenging time reading books that after a few pages he loses concentration and that his mind wanders to other things. The reading that use to come natural to him no longer does and he believes the internet is to blame, what once took a few hours searching through multiple books in the library for information now can be found in a few minutes searched on the internet. He also mentions other bloggers that confess how they either no longer read books or do not read articles that are longer than a few paragraphs or that they just skim articles on the internet. Carr lists many posts from other people also from different years some going back to the 1980s.
In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, the author suggests that modern technology is changing the way him and other people think. He argues that, in the past, it was much easier to engage in long readings. Now, he claims, reading is more challenging and people are more likely to skim a passage rather than fully absorb the information due to excessive use of the internet (313-314). Carr uses Friedrich Nietzsche’s relationship with his typewriter as an example to express that with every new technology, he warns, the human mind is vulnerable to a change in structure (319). Carr observes and suggests that the more people use and rely on computers, the more the human mind essentially becomes a form of artificial intelligence
In Nicholas Carr’s article called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr talks about the many issues he believes are stemming from using online search engines and Google in general. This article was written back in 2016 and published into The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings. Carr discusses his view on the whole idea of online readings and most of the information available to the world being viewed online through a search engine like Google. He also goes into thorough detail explaining how he believes that technology is becoming more advanced and smarter than its creators. In Carr’s article, he will explain all that he believes is wrong with technology in today’s society and how dumbed down it has made us.
In “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr uses persuasion to portray his feeling on what the internet is doing to our brains. He uses his own experiences with the mental changes he has observed in himself to influence the reader. Carr claims that “...my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do”(). He also uses the experiences of his friend not being able to immerse themselves fully in long text as evidence to his claim that the internet is making people stupid.
In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr talks about whether or not modern day technology is making us lazier. He starts out with a popular scene from Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey which is a conversation between a computer and a man named Dave. The computer is saying that its mind is going and that its artificial brain is malfunctioning. This eye catcher shows us how much we actually interact with computer technology now days is what they predicted so long ago the future would be like.
Meredith Weese D. Ballenger ENGL – 112 10 March 2023 Evaluation Essay Nicholas Carr’s article in The Atlantic magazine July/August 2008 issue titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid” purpose is to inform the readers. With the way the internet and its vast amount of information at the tip of our fingers has altered our ability to dive deep into readings. Whether it is for educational purposes or pleasure our ability to spend hours in a book have changed. Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” achieved its purpose because the examples he used from himself and others, the writing is clear easy to follow as he makes relevant references to the way other technologies have changed our way of thinking, his writing is objective.
Carr sees this change as dangerous; he has lost his ability to immerse himself in his reading. Fortunately for Carr, he is a “Digital Immigrant.” Unlike the youth of this generation, referred to as “Digital Natives,” the Internet has merely stunted his practice of deep reading, whereas the Digital Natives never learned
For my analysis essay, I will be analyzing the effectiveness of the rhetorical devices in Nicholas Carr ’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. Carr, a writer who primarily focuses on technology and business, makes a bold claim that the ability to simply search for answers to our issues is weakening our problem solving skills. As the saying goes: if you do not use it, you lose it. Although he admits that the advantages of having unlimited knowledge at our fingertips is invaluable, he also claims that humans tend to misuse the Internet- as soon as anything requires true thought, they go to search engines which think for them.
Technology is advancing very rapidly, but that does not necessarily mean it is benefiting society. In the article, “ Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Nicholas Carr explores how the internet alters people’s mental abilities. Malcolm Gladwell writes an article titled, “ Small Change”, in which he draws attention to how the internet has changed the engagement of social activism. Carr’s argument that the internet alters mental abilities, changes thought processes, and destroys concentration, complicates Gladwell’s thesis that the internet loses the meaning of social activism, changes how activist are defined, and takes over activism on a social level. The arguments presented are similar but the outcomes of the internet vary between the two writers.
The Internet at its inception was a grand experiment with vast amounts of information available to a select few. As the
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.
iGoogle In todays vast network of the Internet and constant upgrades and updates of social media and technology is slowly erasing the use of actually using a book, whether it’s to gain knowledge on a subject or to find out how to make potato salad. In Nicholas Carr’s reading “Is Google Making Us Stupid” he talked about how technology is shaping our brain with the vast information the Internet possesses, he also talks about how we loose focus on long written articles, which he even uses himself as an example of this trait of becoming more intertwined with the internet. Also he talks about how we are becoming more and more dependent towards the Internet. I do agree with Carr’s main points of how we heavily rely on the Internet and that it’s
In Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid” I disagree that his use of support doesn’t work to make his point in this essay because it is too biased. Carr’s article shows a lot of support to his hate towards the internet by quoting himself along with his other fellow writers who are a part of an older generation like Carr himself and only includes one study from University College London. Carr mainly focuses on his anecdotes to help support his essay which really doesn’t give the audience actual information, although he makes a compelling point that Google or the internet itself is making us stupid, but what Carr has not included was any evidence about the good parts about the internet. What Carr was lacking in his essay was that
How does the Internet affect your attention span? Nicholas Carr argues that the Web is detrimental to your ability to focus on literature. He focuses on his personal experiences and what other scholars say about this phenomenon. I believe that having the Web at your disposal makes it easier to focus, considering you can clear up anything you come to be stuck on while reading. With the Internet comes the ability to read something that may be out of a person’s education level since they can search any terminology that is more in depth.
According to this statement the readers can conclude that the main reason for reading concentration disturbance is the internet. In terms of the scientific research, the article provides the research by the British Library and U.K educational consortium which states “They found that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another rarely returning to any source they’d already visitied” (Carr, 2008). From this statement we can understand that there are numbers of attractive information piled on one page, people have a hard time choosing which one to read, resulting them to skim and jump to one another. From these couple examples, it can be concluded that the author of this essay is strongly attempting to convince the readers in his idea of internet disturbing people’s concentration. However, the essay itself is extremely biased, because of the fact that there is no information about benefits of using the internet and reading online.