ipl-logo

Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

804 Words4 Pages

“My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.” Nicholas Carr, a noted blogger and Pulitzer Prize winner, claims this in his article, Is Google Making us Stupid? He argues that humanity has adapted to a different type of thinking that is affecting individuals. Specifically, he feels as though he can no longer progress through a book with having difficulties concentrating. Only a few pages at a time are all he can get through before he feels the need to do other work. His other major point of emphasis focuses on the internet as a giant library available freely at ones fingertips. Rather than having to spend time going through multiple books in a library, a researcher can cut that time in half with the amount of information available …show more content…

Bruce Friedman, a pathologist from the University of Michigan Medical School, says, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print….I can’t read War and Peace anymore…I’ve lost the ability to do that.” Instead of reading everything thoroughly, both researchers and individuals alike use a skimming technique, switching between sources quickly after reading a short part of it. Carr comes back and discusses how Google, motivated by a desire to use technology to solve problems, is a large reason for the mind morphing. Websites, like Google, are the reason people no longer exercise their memories and are becoming more forgetful. Society is becoming, “pancake people…spread wide and thin as we connect with the vast …show more content…

The issue is how. It may not be the same type of intelligence as an older generation, but it does not mean it is better or worse. For example, if you asked someone born in the 1920s to install an application on a cell phone, he/she may look at you with a blank stare. At the same time, if you ask someone born in 1999 if they wanted to roll a hoop with a stick you would get the same blank stare. Part of it is how individuals are raised in society. Not everyone has equal access to new technology, hindering them from potentially expanding their personal knowledge base. On top of that, technology moves and changes at such a rapid pace, even when you are up to date you are still essentially behind the times. As well, with each new piece of technology available comes a new way for society to contemplate reaching different

Show More
Related
275 Words | 2 Pages

In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr argues that Internet changes how we think and act. First, he provides a personal example on how he cannot focus on reading for more than a few pages because Google has made him more efficient in doing research by going online rather than grinding through long readings. Then, Carr presents another example on a blogger, Brue Friedman, who also admits that he lost his ability to read long text after search engine became popular. Furthermore, Carr expresses his idea by using an historical example. Friedrich Nietzsche, who bought a typewriter in the late 1800s, changed his style of writing once he got familiar with the typewriter.

Read More
239 Words | 1 Pages

In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, he states that our minds are changing because of the time we spend online. He explains how not only does the media just supply the information to the users, it also morphs the thoughts that flow in people’s minds. Previous habits such as reading are slowly being affected, but only few have noticed the change. For instance, when surfing the web people skim the articles they’re reading and merely go from link to link. Carr talks about how easy it is to research and find things on the internet within minutes maybe even seconds.

Read More
240 Words | 1 Pages

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

Read More
330 Words | 2 Pages

In the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr expresses his concern that the internet could be negatively affecting the way people think. He begins to argue his point by explaining his own issues of not being able to immerse himself in a book like he could before. Carr then reveals his suspicion that it’s the internet’s fault, and supports that by comparing his own experience to others. Reading is a common hobby for most of the people Carr compares experiences with. Like Carr, they found it difficult to read longer pieces of writing, and some blame the internet as well.

Read More
1150 Words | 5 Pages

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.

Read More
1679 Words | 7 Pages

In his essay Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr argues that our dependence on the Internet changes the way we read and think. He includes his own personal testimony to support this claim, as well as others’ descriptions, including several friends, and bloggers that Carr quote. While he lacks scientific proof supporting his claim, multiple testimonies support his claim that the internet has changed the way people think. However, Carr views this negatively, saying that “I’m not thinking the way I used to think… my concentration often starts to drift… I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text” (633-634).

Read More
977 Words | 4 Pages

In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicolas Carr analyzes the dramatic affects that technologies have been having on our brains. The short summary, the Net is making us all mindless zombies in Carr’s mind, but he is not the only who feels that way. His long dragged out article is abundantly full of meaning examples, personal opinions, and hard facts on the drastic changes the Net has done to our brains. Carr starts his articles with the death of super computer, HAL, from the movie A Space Odyssey.

Read More
856 Words | 4 Pages

He believes the internet is causing our brains to become reorganized and nt store as much as it use to because we rely on the internet

Read More
780 Words | 4 Pages

In the narrative “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr, writer of technology and culture, argues that the instinctive animal that we are, are becoming more equivalent to robotic forms. To support this main idea, Carr suggest internet technology is exerting our animal like brains once processing in old media clock style, to the use of new technology which is awakening our “plastic like brains” to fold and shape not only in cognitive ways but also neurologically. Nicholas Carr emphasizes this through his own distractions while reading on the internet to researching how people’s adaptation and interactions with this technology is remapping their process of viewing text to their methodology of thought through notable personage’s experiences

Read More
1311 Words | 6 Pages

“For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. ”(736) He then goes on about how finding what you need used to require days and now can be done in just a few minutes. He then goes into saying that if he’s not working he finds himself reading and writing emails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos, and listening to podcasts. Even myself I can say that I spend most of my time on my phone or playing a

Read More
359 Words | 2 Pages

Is Google Making Us Stupid? In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr observes that people are beginning to have trouble reading for long periods of time. Carr explains that he is beginning to wonder what the internet is doing to our brains and he states that even he does not think the way that he used to. The author explains that he is also having trouble reading because he has begun to lose his concentration while reading long books or articles.

Read More
316 Words | 2 Pages

1. Nicholas Carr’s argument in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” challenges Thompson’s argument which was that the internet is making people smarter by helping people improve their writing skills when they read other people’s work online. However, Carr believes with so much information available, the internet had changed our “mental habits” in a negative way. The internet has people using “ a form of skimming activity” which decreases how much people read to “no more than one or two pages of an article or book” (Carr 2) before they change to different site. Carr complicates Boyd’s view on how algorithms are filtering what people see on their screen and those who are not digitally literate would be clueless of this.

Read More
564 Words | 3 Pages

Humberto Luna David McDevitt English 100 16 October 2017 Midterm: Option One In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr he argues that the more and more that people start to rely on computers to “mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” (97). He claims that Google is making it hard for everyone to stay concentrated on finishing

Read More
521 Words | 3 Pages

Every day the world is being introduced to new technology to make life easier for people. In the article, “Is google making us stupid”, author Nicholas Carr tells us about how he believes that the internet is making us stupid by changing the way our brain processes information. Carr begins to tell us how the web is causing these issues such as how he can no longer be occupied in a book for a long period of time. He then starts to talk about how his whole life is surrounded by the internet and that is to blame for the problem he has with being able to stay focused while reading; but he also talks about how at the same time the internet benefited him so much because he is a writer. When reading this article, you can see that Carr uses a lot of

Read More
972 Words | 4 Pages

Rhetorical Analysis In the article “Is Google Making us Stupid?”, author Nicholas Carr expresses his idea that the internet is taking over society and our thinking process. Google is affecting our abilities to read books, longer articles, and even older writings. Carr believes that we have become so accustomed to the ways of the internet, and we are relying on Google 's ability to sort through the details for us so we don 't have to, in order to get the information we find necessary more efficiently. He finds that this process has become almost too handy, and that it is corrupting us from becoming better educated.

Read More

More about Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

Related Topics

Open Document