The internet along with many other technological advances has brought humanity a long way. Like with all change, there are positive outcomes as well as negative outcomes, and while having information at our fingerprints and obtainable within seconds might be a positive thing, there are still going to be some negative results. Nicholas Carr’s 2008 article published in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” explains what Carr believes to be some of the negative effects that the usage of the Internet has brought upon us. Carr believes that the Internet is shaping the way that we think and that humans are losing the ability to read long pieces of writing. The purpose of his ironically long article is to convince his readers that the Internet is actually changing the way that we think and interact and to shed light upon something that many people experience, but they might have not realized it yet.
Carr uses many rhetorical elements in order to draw readers in and to keep them interested. He uses a movie reference, as a hook and frame, to begin and end his article. The length of the article was a clever and ironic way to further his point about how humans aren’t able to read lengthy works of writing. Throughout his article he uses the
…show more content…
He used the movie reference to invoke feelings into his readers about what the world has come to in terms of how machine-like we already are. “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence,” he states regarding how our reliance on computers is turning us into “computers” as well. The more and more we rely on computers, the more our intelligence becomes flattened because we aren’t using it like we used to. This metaphor makes his readers think about how the Internet is altering the way we think and not just if it is making us