Summary, Is Google Making us Stupid

In “Is Google Making us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, argues about the way technology is shaping people’s minds. The way the internet has us reading through information, skimming through articles, jumping from article to article, decreases the capacity in our minds to concentrate. Carr states, “One I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (par 3) meaning that now he skims through information, getting the just of it, not analyzing and going deep into the information like he used to. Carr refers to Richard Foreman’s “pancake people” as a description of how people who have adapted to receiving information from the internet, “spread wide and thin”, knowing a little bit of everything as opposed to focusing and deep, concentrating and analyzing. Carr also argues with those who criticize him, bringing up Plato’s Phaedrus where Socrates feared the printing press that replaced the knowledge in minds giving readers what they thought is wisdom. Also that the printing press, as Hieronimo Squarciafico worried, would weaken the minds of people with the availability of books (information). Then now with the internet with infinitely amount of information? Carr does also state that there are positive effects this technology brings.