Friday, February 19, 2010
summary of Is Google Making Us Stupid?
In Nicolas Carr's Is Google Making Us Stupid? he broaches the topic of how we may be being rewired intellectually by the computer. The issue of deep thinking has been almost erased by the use of computers. From jumping from tab to tab, link to link, multi tasking to the extreme. This problem solver may be causing many of its own problems. This computer that we think we control, may actually be controlling us and determining how we think, without us even thinking about it. The rewiring of our ever changing and malleable brains, has caused us to forget how we used to think and process things. Essentially, the computer that we made, has remade our brains to think like it does. Skimming over a million topics a minute, reading only half of the words on the page, losing concentration on one topic after a matter of minutes, is not how our brain used to work (to this extreme). Several times he mentions 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the last paragraph Carr suggests that the most human character in the movie is indeed the computer, and the robotic ones are the humans. Is that what we have or will come to? The computer already thinks for us, when we type one word into google and it suggests a plethora of possible options, but will it begin to control how we write, and how we feel? As Carr says, we will just have to wait and be skeptical for the time being, because there is no way to know now what will happen in the future.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment