"Is Google Making Us Stupid" by Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr writes an essay called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr doesn’t actually believe that Google is making us stupid, it is more of a metaphor for how we are changing the way we think with the advancement through technology. As the internet has advanced with all these pop-up advertisements, and social network connections, we begin to lose our concentration and the ability to comprehend long, complex pieces of writing. In his essay, Carr mentions Frederick Winslow Taylor, who, back in the 1800’s, began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of factory workers. The goal “was to identify and adopt, for every job, ‘the one best method’ of work and thereby to effect ‘the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.’” Taylor assured his followers it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency.
Carr makes a claim that, “what Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.” Carr goes on to say, “In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces we can ‘access’ and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.”