Distracted by the Internet

Nick Carr expresses his opinion about Google that, “It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.” His main point of the article, I think, is to get people to understand what Google, and the Internet in general, is doing to humanity. In a sense, he is saying it’s changing the way we think. There are so many advertisements and links to click on when one is on Google. It is very easy to get distracted from what was originally the goal. Now, because of all the distractions we get online, it is being brought about into our everyday lives. While trying to read an article or book, we often get distracted by our own minds. They tend to wander, leaving no room for what we are reading. This is becoming a struggle for those who are trying to read in depth and find the true meaning of things. Vertical consciousness plays a big role now because things are often skimmed over because one doesn’t have the attention span to read something over and over again without getting bored.

Carr quotes Frederick Winslow Taylor, a man who tried to improve the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia. Taylor explains that, “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.” What he means by this is that technology will eventually be smarter than mankind, because technology is capable of taking in loads information and storing all of it, whereas humans forget a lot of what they learn. Carr claims that, “Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well.” He means that the Internet and technology are changing our minds. He argues this claim with the fact that, “The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as ‘knowledge work.’” What programmers are trying to do is come up with a sort of super computer that is smarter than humans. In a way, the Internet already is, because it knows just about everything there is to know. So as far as knowledge of facts goes, the Internet is smarter.

Another thing Carr talks about is Google’s thought on the efficiency of obtaining information. He says that Google’s view is, “The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.” This is saying that the quicker we can get information, the more we can learn. Google is a good source for this. You can search just about anything on Google and get every bit of information you need on that subject at the click of a button. It is like horizontal consciousness but very fast and easy. You can definitely learn a lot about something and in depth too, but in a short amount of time and easy access. You can learn about something from every point of view from a variety of different perspectives.