Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

The Danger of Infinite Knowledge at Our Fingertips With the vast amounts of knowledge we have at our fingertips today it is hard to believe that it could be making us stupid. According to Nicholas Carr, famed writer and well-known speaker, in his essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr claims that instant access to knowledge is deteriorating our attention spans. With an unlimited amount of information at our disposal, people rely too heavily on Google for shortcuts and quick answers, thus causing the way we interpret and respond to information to become shorthand instead of long term. The internet is weakening our ability to focus on long pieces of text or long assignments. Carr explains that the internet or Google being a primary source

While I do agree with Carr, his paper is rather outdated. Even after being published in 2008 most of the popular social media sites used today had not been launched yet or were not nearly as popular. For instance, Facebook, which had been launched in 2004, had only 220 million users in 2008 compared to the 2.2 billion active users it has today (Schonfeld). With the hundreds of different social media sites and apps people are constantly wasting their time as well as shortening their attention spans. Everywhere you look people are constantly distracted by their phones by the constant need to be connected online. Which I believe plays a role in the regression of focus on a specific task. Even in in my own experience it’s rare to find adults or students who are in meeting or class and aren’t on their phone at the same time. Even I have the same problem, while working or studying it is hard for me to sit and only focus on one thing. I am constantly multitasking, switching the music I’m listening to or taking constant breaks from studying by scrolling through various social media platforms. While others may think that myself and others just aren’t disciplined enough to sit down to work or read, I believe that we are not capable of sitting and working on the original project or task at hand because social media has changed the way we read by changing the way we receive

Twitter, a social media platform used by over 330 million people daily, has a limit of 280 characters per tweet (post) which limits what people can say without going to long and losing the attention of other users. Snapchat, a picture messaging app, limits videos or pictures that are sent to the span of ten seconds on the screen of the person who received it and then it disappears. People spend approximately eight hours a day on social media, which is half the time most people spend awake in a day. Going back to Maryanne Wolf who said, “We are not only what we read, [w]e are how we read,” social media shapes how we think. The short things we spend time reading change how we prefer to read, creating new connections in our minds with the expectation that everything we read will be less than 280 characters. They are dozens of other social media platforms I could dig into, but the point is that our attention spans are dwindling and if we don’t change the way we read and spend our time that fact is never going to change. The days of killing time with large books seem to be behind us now, we would rather spend our free time on our phones and computers, clicking through funny photos or reading short posts by people we don’t even know in real life. Even people without numerous social media