Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

Is the internet changing our ability to focus? Or more importantly, is the internet harming our ability to focus or enhancing it? Based on my interpretation of Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, I believe he thinks it is making us worse. Although he did bring up a few valid points, his opinion is flawed due to the many benefits of the internet as well as a few assumptions he’s made of the effects it’s had on the human population.

Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, brings towards us the argument that the Internet is changing the way think and do day to day activities. Carr starts of the essay by sharing his and other people’s experience with losing the ability to focus deeply. He dwells further into this by

Nicholas Carr proceeds to mention other people’s similar experiences to validate his thought. Nicholas Carr mentions how we have changed our way of reading in response to the internet’s quick paced environment in the next line. ‘They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.’. Although I also have experienced times where reading lengthy text such as this article can be hard due to lack of concentration, I believe it is not the internet’s fault. If we are losing our ability to focus deeply it might have to do with the fact that we as humans are adaptive creatures. In the age we live in now our world is ticking at a very quick pace. We as humans love speed and efficiency, for this reason we have overtime innovated and improved on many elements of our lives. We replaced horses with cars, boats with planes, letters with calls…etc. There are times when we still use the older mentioned items but we try not to if possible. This idea can be transferred towards our ability to concentrate deeply. We still have the ability to concentrate deeply otherwise we would not continue to innovate and answer thought-provoking questions. I believe that if we are not looking to solve the next big question, our minds try to keep us

“In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.” (Carr). The way Carr makes it clear that the previous idea is Google’s and not his makes it seem like he disagrees and even sees the idea as absurd. I believe that Carr does not agree with the statement that we would be more productive thinkers if we were more efficient in data extraction. Carr’s stance on the effects of the internet on our mind is not allowing him to view the benefits that enhanced information processing would have on our ability to think. If we had the ability to find answers quickly to smaller questions we would be able to focus more on the bigger picture and allow us to build on those answers to figure out the more thought intensive