Reading Response 5

In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, his major claim in the essay is that Google and many other search engines are slowly making people not look in depth for the information and is making them less focus on things. This means that people who use the internet have a hard time to research and read things online and full absorb it fully. For example Carr says, “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.” What Nicholas Carr is trying to say through this quote is that he use to find it easy to read a book and find the story through reading the whole thing. In today’s society he finds in hard to get past the first few pages.

A man in Carr’s essay that he quotes is Frederick Winslow Taylor, he is a man who tried to help improve the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia. A quote from that makes Taylorlism is, “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.” This means that in the past that man has always come first before anything and that humans use to have to remember everything. While now in the future age of technology that internet and resources from technology will do all the thinking for humans and also be the memory for the humans because as we know humans don’t have the best memory. Nicholas Carr states, “Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well.” Carr is telling us that the internet and technology in today’s modern society has already starting to take control of our minds. I believe that today we depend on the internet more than ever before that we look to it for our memory that we no longer have, since we live in such a fast pace society. As we know it that internet has all the knowledge for and facts for us, so that is a conclusion that the internet is way smarter.

With Nicholas Carr’s claim that the internet is changing the way people read, think, and write today I totally agree with it. That concentration on things have totally been replaced with procrastinating on assignments that need to be done or even distraction while doing assignment on the computer to be on the internet. For me personally I know that when I am writing a paper for a class I have to stay focus on what I am doing instead of going back and forth while writing the paper to face book to see who is online. I found it kind of hard to focus on the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, while I was reading on the computer but as soon I printed it off I found it easier to read because I wasn’t so distracted. Its hard for me to read a book while the computer is on, listening to my ipod, and even having my cell phone need to me and it go off while I trying to read.