Summary of "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he’s not necessarily saying that Google is making up stupid, but the fact that there is so much that can be going on on a computer screen, our brains are starting to function like it. We can’t focus on one topic and we feel the need to do something else. Bruce Friedman, a person Carr talked to, said, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print” (Carr 2). Carr also mentions, “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long piece of writing” (Carr 2). Now, many people are just skimming writing pieces instead of reading it’s full message and taking in it’s information.
On the net, there is so much going on. We can be on Facebook while looking up the latest topic on Twitter and also finding what’s the latest movie our favorite actor it in all at once when original, trying to write an essay for class. There are also so many things to click on while on the web and the search engines have made it so much easier and faster to look up random information. For instance, when you’re typing something on Google, the first few letters you type in, there will be a drop box on the bottom giving you suggestions on what to choose. It’s like it’s doing the work and thinking for you. Carr said, “’[S]hortcuts’ would give barried readers a quick ‘taste’ of the day’s news, sparing them the ‘less efficient’ method of actually turning the pages and reading the article” (Carr 4). More and more people are getting their news information online or on TV now instead of the paper. But what the news casters do is tell us a rough summary of what the story is about and online, we could just read the title and the brief summary that’s provided before even clicking on the link to read the entire story.
At the Google’s headquarters, they are making it their mission to make “the perfect search engine” where it “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want” (Carr 5). By then, technology will be doing the thinking for us.
But all of this isn’t really “real” in the sense that we can look up all the information all we want online and have what we need to know about a certain topic. That doesn’t compare to actually going to a certain place or meeting certain people. We might feel intelligent for having those source where we can get all the knowledge we want conveniently, but it’s not the same. Carr states from “Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flatters into artificial intelligence” (Carr 7).
It’s not that Goggle is making us stupid, there is just so much information, it’s overwhelming. We can also consume all the knowledge, but will won’t get the jest of what it really is or mean.