Reading Response #2: Nicholas Carr

Caity Chutuk
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

In the essay written by Nicholas Carr titled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr expresses how the amount of time he spends on the internet hinders his ability to read in-depth writing. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think,” acknowledged Carr, “…I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore…The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” Carr follows up his experiences with similar experiences of other writers that seem to be going through this same kind of ‘readers block.’ He explains how the internet “propels” him to the related works necessary to finishing his pieces of writing, comparing it to “pointing” to related works that books do. Even though the internet is no doubt much faster, in his opinion, faster might not always be better.

“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 worlds. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski,” insisted Carr. In the end, Carr admits that maybe he’s “just being a worrywart,” which by being skeptical about his own ideas, leads readers to become skeptical of all his previous claims and sources backing up his original idea. By wrapping up the article in this way, Carr allows readers to come up with their own opinions, whether they’re a skeptic, like Carr appears to be in the end, or following the facts, like Carr seems to be in the beginning.

In this essay, I think Carr is trying to make people understand that their minds don’t work the way the internet does. We can’t pull up a dictionary in our head in less than two seconds flat, nor can we bring up previously written articles or essays in order to support a claim we are making. Even though the internet is an extremely helpful source in getting information, the human mind works slower, more like a book when one is looking up information. Carr is trying to get his readers to acknowledge and contemplate that, as a source of his, James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says, “Even the adult mind is very plastic. The brain has to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

In my opinion, the internet does alter the way I think. For me, when writing an essay or an article, when I can’t think of a word it’s easy to Google search for synonyms. When I need examples of how I want to begin or conclude my writing, I Google search for others who have written similar articles and take a look at how they approached the issue. When I’m confused about what a word or phrase means, I Google search for the definition. Basically, Google, and the internet in general, has created a world where all one has to do is enter a few characters into a search engine and they can have all the makings of an essay. Carr shows that he agrees with this idea in his statement, “The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.”