Is Google making us stupid?

Cora Howell
Reading Response 2
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicolas Carr claims that the internet and Google are actually making us stupid. He says that immersing himself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy for him, but now that is rarely the case. He includes, “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.” After I read this, I began to think of myself. This is often what happens to me. When I am searching through Google for a homework assignment, I look for the smallest article possible so that I can find the answer I am looking for and waste the least amount of time possible. I believe that this is exactly what Carr is referring to. We want our answers and we want them with the least amount of work on our part. “Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.” So why should we waste our precious time searching for answers in a much more difficult place when they can be given to us in a matter of seconds online? Well, if we were to consider Socrates’ fear about the development of writing back in his time, I think we could become to realize how much the internet is effecting us today. Socrates feared that “as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, ‘cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.’” The new technology of writing did, in fact, have some of the effects that Socrates was scared of. So maybe Carr is actually trying to warn us that we may think that the growing technology of the internet is helping us, but it is actually taking our “smart” with it as it moves.
The internet might be making us “stupid,” but I believe that we are contributing to our own growing stupidity. We have a choice on how to research for a project or how to spend our free time. Unfortunately like Carr said, we want the shortest and easiest way possible. But if we would really like to hold on to our knowledge, we can. The internet doesn’t have control over us and we don’t have to use it if we don’t choose to. Although I am saying this, I have to confess that I would rather use the internet myself. Like Carr had stated, “my mind expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.” Even this article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid” frightened me when I first set my eyes on it because of its long grueling eight pages. So yes, maybe the internet is making us stupid, but we cannot forget that we have a choice to stop it. There are hopefully always going to be other resources available.