Reading Response # 5 : Is Google Making Us Stupid?

It is without question that the Internet has provided society with a great deal of convenience. Any quick question and answer can be found thanks to strong search engines like Google. This instant information may seem like a valuable resource on the surface, but as one digs deeper the availability of information might not seem like such a godsend. Nick Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” presents the concept that the convenience of the Internet is changing the way our minds work when we access it. He promotes this change through his own thoughts, “…my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. His central claim is that the Internet is developing some slight symptoms of ADHD in our minds. The way obtain information is so simple and brief that our minds have adapted to only handle simple, brief information like that found on the internet. Nick Carr uses lots of evidence ranging from other writers to actual studies on the issue. Studies from the University College London suggest that “people using these sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they had already visited.” This is pretty strong evidence that our minds of changing. At first, I tried not to take Carr’s claims very seriously, but after this piece of evidence I had to admit to myself that he may have a point; I had just skimmed over his article a few times before actually diving into it.
Nick Carr even uses the great philosophers’ words as evidence. Socrates wrote about the fear of the development of writing and Carr makes that relative to his claim. Socrates emphasizes that people that develop their writing will “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” Google provides information for society with so much freedom that perhaps, society doesn’t know how to properly store it all in our minds. Today’s knowledge is becoming surrounded by simple information and facts that are easily accessible, but that isn’t real philosophical knowledge. Carr’s claims here are the most important because they provide evidence for change in one’s mind due to the Internet. The sad fact is that the Internet is not that old and these trends are likely to continue. They have gained the attention of scholars today and were even predicted by the philosophers of the past. These ideas are not going unnoticed and as learning is being affected it is probably time to act on these developments. I can see myself with growing symptoms of ADHD and have even been diagnosed with it. The majority of my friends have as well. The growing number of diagnoses over the past decade is phenomenal. I figured this was due to the greed of the corporate pharmaceutical companies and the lack of FDA supervision, but maybe there is a related trend with what Nick Carr has brought to my attention.