Response to "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

In "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", the author, Nicholas Carr suggests that the internet has had a negative affect on the human brain. Society was once a place where man would pour over his readings, spending a great deal of time researching, looking up articles, and drinking in all the information. Ever since the internet has been a part of our world, it has greatly reduced the amount of time we spend looking things up, but it has also caused us to become lazy in our reading. We begin to lose our concentration when we start reading a long article, we can no longer sit still so we move on and begin to search for something else. "The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle," explains Carr. Maryanne Wolff supports Carr in that she also believes that the Net is encouraging people to read "a style of writing that puts 'efficiency' and 'immediacy' above all else" and thus causing us to weaken our willingness for a deeper reading that surfaced with the invention of the printing press. In 1936, Alan Turing believed that the computer "could be programed to perform the function of any other information-processing device, and boy was he right. The computer is now able to include many household appliances, those of which include: clock, radio, TV, telephone, and calculator-just to name a few. But it doesn’t end there. Carr doesn’t know if he has the right mind set, he can’t see a hundred years down the road and see how the computer will affect us. It may be for the better or for the worse, he will never know, but he can’t help but think that what used to be ‘our own intelligence has flattens into artificial intelligence’.

I can’t help but agree with Carr. I feel that we are not only reading differently, but our lives are different too. Because we spend so much time on the computer, now that it can also be other appliances (TV, radio, etc...), I feel that we are not spending as much time outside of the home or with our families that we should be. Some people now a days think that since they can talk to their friends on facebook, they don’t have to talk to them face to face. Sure, maybe they will take in a lot of information with the amount of time they spend on the computer, but the more time they spend on it, the less time they spend in the real world. If they get too much of it they will lose the firm connection they once had with their friends. Soon, the only relationship they will have will be with their computer. I’d hate to live that kind of life, and yet I already see some of my friends turning into that person. Carr was right when he suggested that the internet is affecting our brain, but it’s not the internet’s fault. It is up to us to change our ways and get back on track with our lives.