Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

Since the dawn of time humanity has evolved new ways of thinking, learning, and doing. In the 1980’s the internet was born. The internet has acted as a global source of information. Like everything in this world, the internet has its pros & cons. A number of people have recently suggested that the internet can cause physical and physiological changes to the human brain. The debate is whether the physical and physiological changes are detrimental. In 2008 The Atlantic publishes an article by Nicholas Carr who discusses his take on the critical conversation presenting what the internet is doing to our brains in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. When analyzing Nicholas Carr’s stance on the argument, one would both agree and disagree with Carr.
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Carr attacks his readers emotions through the use of known creditable works of others and his own personal experience to further persuade his intended audience that the internet is “chipping away” (Carr, 315) our capacity to learn, think, and comprehend. Carr early on in his article brings his audience a quote from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that reads “DAVE, stop. STOP, will you? Stop, Dave?” (qtd Kubrick 313) This one side dialogue is from HAL, a supercomputer Carr is comparing himself and his audience to because HAL feels as if his mind is going. In quoting this dialogue Carr is using the “weirdly poignant” (Carr 313) to paint a negative mental image in his audience’s minds. Doing so made his readers easily

Carr decides to quote Richard Forman’s sentences from Forman’s recent essay. For example, Carr uses “As we are drained of our inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance, we risk turning into pancake people ---spread wide and thin as we connect with vast network of information accessed by the ere touch of a button” (qtd Forman 328) The essence of Carr’s use of this specific quote from Richard Forman’s essay is paint a negative mental image into his intend audience minds. The words and phrases like pancake people, drained, and risk all have negative cogitations. Carr also puts a lot of effort into getting his readers to feel and to persuade them into feeling the same way he does when stating:
“I can feel it too. Over the past years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the natural circuity, reprogramming my memory. My mind isn’t going---so far as I can tell---but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.” (Carr