Summary of "Is Google Making us Stupid"

When we talk about Nicholas Carr and his written article titled “is Google Making Us Stupid”, we get to see how the internet is syncing us as a society to make us unproductive and go off into another dimension and spend hours aimlessly on the internet finding random items that we only skim through rather than diving deeper within the text. At the start of the essay, Carr says that his recent difficulties with concentrating while reading books and long articles may be due to spending a lot of time on the Internet. He states that regular Internet usage may have the effect of diminishing the capacity for concentration and contemplation in the way we write or read deeply. “[w]hat the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” (Carr, page 2, paragraph 2) He displays his argument with a couple of anecdotes from bloggers on their changing reading habits, as well as the findings of a 2008 University College London study titled "Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future" which suggests the emergence of new types of reading. He cites Maryanne Wolf, an expert on reading, for her expertise on the role of media and technology in learning written languages. Carr raises the point that unlike speech, which is an innate ability hardwired into the human brain, the ability to read has to be taught in order for the brain to rearrange its original parts for the task of interpreting symbols into words. He acknowledges that his argument does not yet have the backing of long-term neurological and psychological studies. Carr further draws on Wolf's work, particularly her 2007 book Proust and the Squid, to relate his argument to the way in which neural circuits in the reading brain are specifically shaped by the demands particular to each written language, such as Chinese, Japanese, and alphabet-based scripts. Therefore, Carr defines that the neural circuitry shaped by regular Internet usage can also be expected to be different from that shaped by the reading of books and other page-based written material.

Posted by Mike Kingma & Beth Brummel