Is Google Melting Our Brains?

In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” he advocates that the internet is in the making of distinguishing deep and thought and contemplation that comes with reading from a book. Carr continues to state throughout his piece that the internet is changing our minds to be less attentive, and that we skim read more than deep read. Carr quotes a media theorist Marshall McLuhan who says, “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Carr uses different people throughout his article for his support. He even refers to events of the past to enlighten his theory. He acknowledges an old writer called Friedrich Nietzsche who used to write everything by hand but eventually bought a typewriter because his eyes could no longer stand to look at paper. Nietzsche learned how to type from muscle memory, but his friend told him that his prose had changed completely “from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.” Carr believes that since what we read has changed our brain has changed along with it. Our brain no longer goes deep into the sea of words like a scuba diver, but skims it for information we need like someone on a Jet Ski.
I agree with Carr that people in general are becoming lazier when it comes to our reading. Many people these days would rather look for information on the internet for a few minutes than spend a few hours at the library. Carr explains how our brains are very plastic. That even in adulthood, nerve cells within the brain continue to break connections and create new ones. It makes sense that when the form of our reading material changes the way our brain absorbs that material changes as well. However, when Carr states in his article that “Our ability to interpret text…remains largely disengaged,” I cannot agree with him. I believe that although the current generation is doing a large amount of their reading on the internet, they are still able to interpret and put their own ideas into the material that they are reading. We may be absorbing more information but it does not drain out our ability to feel and react to what we are reading. I still remain very engaged into texts when I am reading any type of writing. But that may also be because I enjoy reading and not be the case for everyone.
As Carr admits in his own article, he is being a worrywart. I acknowledge that the internet has a significant impact on my generation, but I do not believe it is exactly a negative impact. The internet is a valuable source of information that the world would not be able to live without. It is unfortunate to admit how much our world does rely on technology, but if we had been worrywarts in the past and looked down upon progress, our world would not as much as efficient. It would be slower, and yes we would have more time to contemplate situations, but we would also not have access to materials such as Carr’s article.