Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he states, “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing” (page 2). Carr mentions this to a few people on online blogs and they say that this is true. Many people have just stopped reading books altogether. Some lose the ability to gain all the information a piece of writing is about and they just end up skimming the work.
The internet gives us so many distractions that we just can’t focus on one thing at a time. While writing an essay, could have a browser open to your Facebook. Another for your email and a tab open for something else you’re interested it. Just the other day, a friend of mine said it took him ten hours to get through his Chemistry assignment for the night when it could have easily take him a mere two hours. It was because he got distracted by everything the easy access to the web.
Our brains begin to develop this habit and we apply it to everyday use. I personally can’t sit down and read an article fully without getting bored unless it‘s a novel. It took me at least five attempts to finish reading this essay and I still couldn’t remember all the facts about it. Out brains has been trained to multitask. I feel lazy when I’m just working on one thing at one time.
Carr also says, “They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would ‘bounce’ out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but that’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it” (page 2). That’s absolutely true. I can name a few people who find an article for an assignment and they read a portion of it to use in their essay and would never read the rest of it even if they were interested in it.
We just can’t seem to stay focused on one topic.