In Nicholas Carr's essay titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" the author writes "what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation." Carr is making his claim that he is feeling the loss of what he had by using the Internet for most of his reading rather than his past ways. The author is disturbed by the impact of the information superhighway on himself, and found that there were others that were feeling the same way.
Carr's uses the example in which the supercomputer HAL in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey memory circuits are coldly disconnected, HAL begins pleading "Dave, my mind is going," and forlornly says "I can feel it, I can feel it". Carr then writes, he is "not thinking the way I used to think" he can feel it too. "The Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind". He feels that utilizing the net so much, he is losing his understanding of what he reads and his level of absorbing it all has diminished.
"I'm not the only one." in addition to "...literary types, most saying they're having similar experiences seem to back up his theory that this phenomena is actually taking place in society, it is not just him. Types of experiences stated in Carr's essay include, "the more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing." Bruce Friedman, a blogger "described how the Internet has altered his mental habits." and further states that he now has "...almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print". Futhermore "They found that people using the sites exhibited "a form of skimming activity," hopping from one source to another and rarely retuning to any source they'd already visited" as part of a five-year research program. Skimming, hopping, from source to source seems to diminish what we are actually absorbing. Maryanne Wolf a developmental psychologist explains "We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works." Carr writes " If we lost those quiet spaces or fill them up with "content," we will sacrifice something important, not only in ourselves, but in our culture" furthermore writing "That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence." Playwright Richard Foreman's states "I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available." The instantly available is the what the author is most concerned about, perhaps need to search and be a detective while reading, makes us remember and retain more of what we are actually reading.
In Carr's essay he makes good arguments for his title but, I feel that it isn't just google, but all of the instant reading and shortcuts we do in our society from a ton of different sources. Examples being text messages, news feeds along the bottom of our TVs, electronic billboards, twitter, even blogs! Is it really making us stupid or really just so overwhelmed to the point where our minds need more RAM or a faster processor? Since there isn't chance of that happening, perhaps we should find the time to pick up a good book once in awhile, so we don't get to stooopid.
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