...various ways. In the essays, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “Mind Over Mass Media” the Authors share their opinions on the impacts that technology advancement and mass media have made within the following amount of recent years. For example, in the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Author, Nicholas Carr, who is a much known writer and also finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, discusses how his level of thinking has changed due to using technology. He also supports all of his evidence that he discusses throughout his essay...
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...tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.” (Carr, Nicholas “Is Google making us stupid?”) I have asked myself the question “Is Google making us stupid?” (Carr) a dozen times while trying to write this paper. For me, we are only as stupid as we give ourselves credit for, Google or no Google. When I think of all the things that I would love to know, I don’t blame the Internet, Google or the amazing strides that technology has taken over the decades for my inherent stupidity on certain matters. I blame myself, for not taking the time or using the resources that are amazing displayed to me through libraries, computers or the people who hold the knowledge within them. Google is not making us stupid, it’s just another thing that we can blame for our stupidity. Scientifically there may be valid points to Carr’s essay in regards to how people process information today compared to ages ago. Carr begins his essay...
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...Flavia Tamayo English 101 January 23rd 2016 The Internet is Not Dumbing Us Down Nicholas Carr, the technology writer laments the rise of the internet in our lives in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” published in 2008. Carr compares reading on the internet with the printed version and comes into the conclusion that reading through the internet is basically the shallower form of reading. Starting his article describing his problems by describing new technologies to be “chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplacing”.(Carr 236) Because of the internet, he is unable to keep his focus on reading any books or long articles. Therefore, affirming that the long term use of the internet is harmful for concentration and contemplation, consequently affecting people to become dumber and digitals fools. Fortunately, that is not true. Internet is not making people dumb, it has rather changed the object of focus. Knowledge now is moving from one room to the hyperlink medium, from content to connections and from libraries to network. In other words, it is not wrong to say that we are in fact truly getting smarter with the increadible amount of informations available in the internet. Nicholas Carr says that from the past few years, he has been feeling an uncomfortable sense that his way of thinking when reading has changed with the excess use of the internet, claiming: “My mind now expects to take in information the ...
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...Kristyna Pavlickova WR 098 Professor Finlayson 04/05/2012 Is internet really making us better off? Comparing Diana Schaub’s “Unfriending Friendship” and Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nowadays it can be considered a general fact that the internet helps people in various ways, not only at work, but also in their personal lives. Most people see the internet and social networks as an enormous asset to their everyday life. However, according to Diana Schaub in her essay, “Unfriending friendship,” and Nicholas Carr in his essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” the internet and social media also causes negative effects on our everyday life. Even though these two essays, both written around the year 2010, have different topics and there are certainly differences in the authors’ writing styles, they still have some similarities. These two essays share a similar theme: that the internet and social media diminish our human capabilities to think and make friends. Some differences occur in how Carr and Schaub approach their readers’, one author uses personal examples and the other shows differences in word meanings. In Carr’s article, he includes his own examples to show readers how the internet has changed his capability of reading longer texts; now his attention span has greatly decreased because he is used to short style of text on the internet. At the beginning of Carr’s essay there is a short part of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Oddyssey which Carr uses to...
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...Composition II 17 February 2014 Reaction to “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr In “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr suggests that Google and the ability to quickly access information is shrinking our attention span, and changing the way we view things. He starts off by saying the Internet is a resource we can use for almost anything. However, it is damaging our ability to focus. Carr describes how he has asked many of his friends and acquaintances if they are having similar problems when it comes to reading and not being able to focus, and many of them said that they are. He says Google takes us off topic with what we are reading, because we can now scan the text for information. This article also claims that technology is a huge distraction in our lives. We are becoming too accustomed to having the Internet right at our fingertips to do everything for us. He talks about how the Internet is, in a way, becoming a brain to replace our own. Although Nicholas Carr’s theory to a point is agreeable, his overall conclusion is not. Towards the beginning of Carr’s work, he states, “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.” Although he makes this statement, this is not true for everyone. If Internet is damaging the ability to read long, more complex passages then learn to manage time spent on the Internet. Carr sees only one side of the change we are going through. Carr is most...
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...Should it be embraced or rejected? The World Wide Web offers an abundance of information and has changed the way society gathers information, interacts with each other, and possibly the way society thinks. In analyzing Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google making Us Stoopid?” and Tyler Cowen’s “Three Tweets for the Web” the impression that readers were likely to be left with is very calculated. Both take positions on the issue of how the World Wide Web will affect the thought processes of the people who frequently use it; however, they are in complete opposition of each other in their viewpoints. When comparing “Is Google making Us Stoopid?” to the components of an argument, in Chapter 5 of Dialogues: An Argument Rhetoric and Reader by Gary Goshgarian and Kathleen Krueger, the essay is properly structured. The introduction is in place, although it does not clearly state the thesis or position of the essay. If the target audience is not familiar with “A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick” the desired effect will likely be lost resulting in confusion from the very beginning. Mr. Carr’s position on the implications and effects on the human brain is stated in the title and again in the second paragraph and is in clear contempt of the alleged outcome. He proffers that the media, which most of society divulge in, not only supplies the train of thought but may actually sculpt the train of thought. The sources that he refers to are a mix between being verifiable while others are identified...
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...The main idea of Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” is that the internet, mainly google is our main source to get information and we don’t depend on anything else which starts to affect us eventually. In the article Nicholas Carr talks about how his mindset has changed when it comes to reading a book or article. Carr says “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages” (paragraph 2) Depending only in the internet in today’s society affects our ability to sit still and read. In the context of Nicholas Carr’s essay. “human” is defined as a person who as the ability to function and obtain knowledge on their own or through other humans and not the internet. The type of threat “machines” are to “humans” is being...
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...Introduction When was the last time you held still and read the same book or article for thirty minutes, an hour, two? Living in a modern world means many great inventions filled with interesting information all at the touch of a screen. Anything a person can think of can be “Googled” and thousands of results will come up in a near instant; Google even helpfully informs how long it takes to retrieve the information. With so much material at one’s fingertips the possibilities are endless. In his paper Nicholas Carr addresses the issue, how much of this information is processed by the brain and how much do we surf past like a wave in the ocean? Summary In his essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” author and member of Encyclopedia of Britannica’s...
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...grew up with the internet. They hear stories from their parents and grandparents about the good old days. I don’t know how many times I have heard the line “I never had Facebook or Twitter when I was your age” at family dinners. As a technology that has been rooted into our culture, we need to ask ourselves: how is this technology effecting us? In his essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr tackled this very question. Carr has a very different answer than I do. Nicholas Carr will attempt to teach you to be skeptical of the internet’s potentially negative effects on your mind. Carr has taken the easier route of criticizing a relatively new technology without offering any alternative suggestions or...
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...certain changes the rapid advancement of technology has brought about… especially modern man’s growing dependence on the Internet. This reaction is nothing new historically, for there have been alarmists at every turning point in human progress. In Nicholas Carr’s article, “IS GOOGLE MAKING US STIPID?” the author voices this same fear. He writes, “When we read online…….we tend to become mere decoders of information.” Carr shares this argument with Maryanne Wolf, a psychologist at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the reading Brain”. Carr’s primary concern is that physical changes to the human brain are caused by heavy use of online technology such as Google. He focuses only on changes to a single aspect of brain function, but these changes may not be even as harmful as he fears. While he did good research, and there is no question about his facts, this paper argues that the positive aspects of online reading far outweigh the negative aspects. Speaking at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College on September 28, 2012, Nicholas Carr was quick to acknowledge that Google and the Internet have made many positive contributions to modern life. As a vast and readily available source of information, the Internet has greatly benefited education in particular. Carr’s main concern is that the minds of heavy Internet users may become mere decoders of information, rather than being processors of knowledge and wisdom. That would present...
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...Introduction Nicholas Carr’s 2010 article titled “Does the Internet Make You Dumber” is an attempt to shadow the usefulness of the internet as a whole in a negative light. This short article, originally published in the Wall Street Journal, makes a fervid bid to discredit the internet and persuade individuals that we as a society were smarter before we began relying so heavily on the internet as an avenue to gain information. Carr manages to adequately present and support his very one-sided view of the argument without attempting to make room for a counter argument at all. I personally am of the opinion that Carr is being short sighted; he is beginning with a conclusion and bending the narrative to support his point of view. Summary It is a difficult task to summarize Carr’s article while including the sort of emotional one-sidedness he presents in the full text of the article. The short article is packed with references to studies performed by prominent universities and research groups, all of which contend that the internet is stripping the ability to think critically out of our minds today. This really is the main point of Carr’s article which he seems to circle around and come back to frequently; our ability, as a whole society, to think critically is perceived as being diminished and this will the ruin of man. While Carr doesn’t specifically make this assertion directly in his article, he is circling the topic the entire time and in his concluding paragraph states:...
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...The Wonders and Wonder Falls of the Internet After multiples readings of Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, I found that he is writing from his own person experiences as well as what he deliberates, contemplates, and gets from other significant opinions and/or research. He has a major point that he makes very clear in his text. There are also several indented points that Carr points out. I want to point out that some of the statements made by Carr went through my thoughts as it was exactly what I was having trouble with, myself. He states in the beginning of his text that he starts to notice that rather than actually reading, we begin to speed-read over text. I find his statement somewhat true being it is what I found myself doing the first time I read Carr’s text. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” clearly expresses that the internet is not only distraction to our minds but that it could be allowing us to depend upon the internet more than classic research. Carr used many examples that allowed his claim to stand tall. He referred to the watch, the television, email, the steam engine, and many other modern technologies but Google and the internet being his key points. Carr is writing this essay as persuasive but informative. “If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them with “content”, we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.” (Carr) The text also displays sub-claims that I found to be interesting. He believes that even though...
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...Introduction Technology has been increasing its use in our day to day lives for years now. The amount of technology that kids are using and are exposed to can easily be concluded as being a great deal more than previous generations. Does this increase in technological availability affect us, though? This question is at the heart of Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In a study done in 2011 by the American Psychological Association, they found that “adults over the age of 55 who had had a black and white television set growing up had a higher likelihood of dreaming in black and white. However, younger users who had always had a color television . . . were much more likely to dream in Technicolor.” This is just one example of how the change of and increased use of technology can alter the way our minds think and function. Carr poses his thoughts and opinions about the effects technology is having on our brains, while...
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...In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He address the social topic of the effect of technology on our brain, more specifically certain processes that occur within our brain such as thought process, attention span, mental capacity, and so on. Throughout this article, Carr attempts to use many different rhetorical strategies to bolster the argument of his essay and its purpose. These rhetorical strategies include tone, Carr’s specific use of diction, and the overall organization of Carr’s article. All of these rhetorical techniques are used to effectively expose the argument of the article to the reader and lead the reader to the same conclusion as Carr fulfilling his purpose as the author. First, Carr uses the tone of the opening passage and article to set the basis for the article and establishes how the rest of the essay is going to be. Carr seems to be using a ominous, foreshadowing tone that is shedding a public light on a darker topic. The tone, matched with the theme of the article, is best expressed in quotes such as one found on page 3 of his...
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...Brain on Cruise Control Of course with a huge invention such as the Internet. a lot of change would come with it. Some of the change maybe good and some bad. The Internet has brought a lot of information to us that is now easily accessible. With the help of Google and smartphones, the Internet is accessible almost anywhere and we can find answers quickly. In Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making us Stupid?” He discusses how he believes Google and the Internet is making us change. “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.” (Carr). The Internet along with all it’s magnificence has also changed the way we think and put our brains on cruise control. Ultimately, I agree with most of what Carr says in his writing. I don’t necessarily believe that Google is making us stupid, but I believe that Google is changing the way we think. I myself have almost always had Google avaliable to me. In Middle school, when I first began writing papers and doing research I was also required to have a few sources but at least one would have to be from a book reference as well. This only lasted a couple of years til I reached High School and was only using the Internet for resources. After that I never needed to use a book for research ever again. I believe this molded my brain. I was able to find the information I needed instantly with no deep thought needed. I did not need to read through a whole book to find excerpts or the correct research...
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