Is Google making us stupid?

Katelyn Gordon

In the article “is Google making us stupid?” Nicholas Carr explains his views about how technology is effecting the younger generations. He goes a lot into how they are losing their ability to research and writ like the people of older generations, and that they are using their “texting language” inappropriately in essays and academic writing. He also argues how they use the internet too much and that they are losing there attention span when reading. “My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. 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. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” Carr explains. He goes into how we tend to just scan a paper or article to get the main idea of it instead of careful reading and studying.
As far as Google making us stupid I don’t agree. I think we are becoming more resourceful and saving time with technology and new skills. The fact that the younger generations can find any information just by going on line and searching it super quick and having answers in the matter of minutes is amazing. Rather than going to a library and looking through book after book just to find a quote or passage spending hours of your time for one thing. Then with what Carr said about the “texting Language” and how it is being misused I disagree again. Yes, the younger generation does use abbreviations and shortcuts, but they know when it is appropriate and when it’s not. I do agree that having the internet and a using key boards is changing the way we write, he quoted over 7 different people on that topic with supporting evidence backing him up. Lewis Mumford explains “how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”” Carr has many examples like this that back up his point. Although I disagree with much that Carr says, I fully endorse his final conclusion that we are becoming emotionless and “almost robotic”. “People have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine… as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence. “