"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Reading response #5

Nick Carr’s central claim in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” is that the internet has changed the way people think. His article focuses on the benefits that the internet has lent its users, as well as the downfalls. One of these benefits is that people have a world of information at their fingertips. Through search browsers like Google, users can find information on anything their minds can think up. A downfall of this is that fast information is beginning to change our thinking. “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” Carr explains, “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.” Carr is talking about how the internet is re-shaping thought, that peoples’ minds are conforming to the ideals of the internet. One searches for something and is handed all of these different things, giving the user so many options to look through. This causes so much distraction that the user can forget what they were originally after. Concentration has flown out the window and left users to their distracted skimming. Carr makes many claims in his article and has a lot of evidence to back them up. The claim that I find most interesting is one toward the end of the article. He is talking about Google as a company and what that company is trying to accomplish. The creators of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin say, “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people- or smarter….certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” This claim is pretty much saying that the mind should operate like a computer or a search engine; that we need to be able to think of many things at once, and process it all. This is a disturbing thought; maybe one day people will be little more than fully functioning computers. Maybe that far-fetched idea that robots will take over the world isn’t so far-fetched. In Carr’s words “The brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.” I find this claim so interesting because it seems as though Google is attempting to take over, or control, the way people think, read, and find information.
I completely agree with Nick Carr’s claim that the internet has changed the way people read, write, and think. Concentration has been replaced with distractedness and procrastination. I know that I almost have to force myself to focus on an assignment when it I need to complete it on my computer. Even when reading Carr’s article, my mind kept straying to the fact that I need to send my friend a message on Myspace, and wondering who was online. When I go on Youtube to watch a music video, I always go to the list on the side of the screen to see what new or related video I can watch next. I end up on something COMPLETELY different from what I started out on. Although, I am able to read with a natural concentration that has stayed with me since becoming an internet junkie. I always have to be reading a book, and it’s something I do nightly. I have been able to keep my ablity to read with depth.