Summary Of Nicholas Carr Is Google Making USupid

Humans are always looking for change and development. Several of these changes are made to be convenient. Humans refined telephones to cell phones for convenience. They made laptops from computers for convenience. Even the invention of sliced bread was made for convenience. Humans continue to find a ways to make things easier for themselves because it is natural to want less work to do. The Internet and search engines blew up in popularity because of their efficiency. Despite their convenience, several people believe that technology and the Internet have negative effects on people. Nicholas Carr, for example, argues that the Internet can have damaging consequences to one’s brain in his essay,“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.Although the Internet

In the past, many people, including Nicholas Carr, were able to read continuously (Carr). However, this has changed due to the increasing prevalence of the Internet in modern society. In his essay, Carr states, “the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” According to McLuhan, the Internet is actively trying to grab your attention. As a result, accessing the Internet causes people to lose their focus. Furthermore, Carr mentions, “When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws...A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.” Carr further describes the negative effects of the Net by explaining how advertisements and hyperlinks are used to divert the user’s attention. Consequently, users often lose focus on the initial content they were reading. Carr goes on to describe how the amount of time one spends on the Internet can lead to a greater loss of focus. According to his essay,

According to his essay, Carr used to be able to learn from reading long passages and books. However, after using the Internet often, he states, “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (Carr). Carr’s metaphor describing how he absorbed information explains how the Internet causes people to read too quickly instead of understanding books and articles to their full extent. He describes how information on the internet is shorter and it only focuses on the main points. As a result, people become accustomed to shorter passages. To add, Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University, stated, “When we read online, she says, we tend to become ‘mere decoders of information.’ Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged” (Carr). Wolf explains how the much of the information on the Internet has a different structure which is why many of the users are unable to deeply comprehend passages. Instead, the users understand the information vaguely as if they skimmed a passage as opposed to reading it. Therefore, the Internet results in people absorbing information ineffectively due to its