Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

The Internet has become a great tool for our use in finding information. Search engines like Google allow us to quickly find any information that we are looking for and therefore increasing our knowledge on a topic. However, recently there have been some people who believe search engines like Google are doing the opposite and is making us “stupid’'. They believe that the Internet is replacing knowledge with efficiency. In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” which was published in The Atlantic in 2008, Carr makes the argument that reading online is less thought provoking than reading books. In this paper I will focus on the various claims that Carr uses to support his argument as well as outside sources that contradict, extend

He says, since he has spent the past ten years “working online, searching the internet and writing content for databases” the way his brain focuses has changed. He informs us that he is not the only one who is also having this issue. He mentions to us that some of the fellow writers he knows have experienced very similar kinds of changes in their reading and concentration levels throughout the years. A few of them said they tend to not reach for books as easily because their concentration and focus levels have become shorter and find it less enjoyable, more of a task they must complete. They would tend to use a skim method when searching online to find the information they needed and be done. The more they use this method, the more they find it a struggle to stay focused on the task at hand. Scott Karp, an online blogger who writes about media, said that he has stopped reading books all together. Karp states: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, but because the way I think has changed” (Carr 68). The internet seems to be affecting the ability for people to be able to

Zimmer who is a popular writer and blogger who has written several books as well as essays which have been published in The New York Times, Discover and the National Geographic and author of “How Google Is Making Us Smarter” published in the February 2009 issue of Discovery Magazine. Zimmer argues peoples thinking process are actually made up of both their brain as well as the environment we surround ourselves with. Zimmer tells us that our mind only records what we need to know and not everything around us. Zimmer and a few other of his colleagues conducted an experiment to prove their reasoning, he asked a group of students to pay attention and count how many times a basketball was passed around the court. Sometime during the middle of the experiment, a student walks onto the court in a costume, at the end of the experiment when Zimmer and his colleagues asked how many students noticed the student in the costume, many did not because it wasn't part of the task they were asked to do (Zimmer Paragraph 8). Zimmer’s experiment complicates Carr’s claim because it shows that we can focus on the task at hand, intact we can be so focused that we can miss something that is not part of the task. So, for Carr to say that Google is at fault for making his brain work in a