Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Paragraphs 10, 11, 33-End)

Nicholas Carr, the author of [I]s Google Making Us Stupid, claims that “we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s” because we as a society have more opportunities to read or spell whether its text messaging or typing frequently on the web. Carr suggests that our central medium is no longer television, but more towards interacting to one another through the internet or by text. Carr uses examples of work done by Maryanne Wolf, the author of [p]roust and the Squid: The Story of Science and the Reading Brain, claiming that the internet is using functions within ourselves to create a pho sense of efficiency in the way we read deeply in text. When reading on the web, we tend to become “decoders” and look only the surface of the writing rather than digging deeper into the writing. “HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency.” (Carr, 7) what this means is that humans are going to work not for themselves but they are wanting the people to be distracted, they are doing exactly what the company wants them to do.

Mike Kingma
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Beth Brummel