Carr’s main claim/controlling idea

In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nick Carr claims that people are relying too much on quick and easy search engine, and he uses the most widely used, Google Search Engine, to support his claims. The idea and usage of deep reading and deep thinking is diminishing with the computer and the internet being just a click away from information. Our minds have changed and even adapted to become bored with reading an article that is really long. The users of Google have changed their minds to think in quick spurts with short attention spans, and now rely upon the rapid results of a search on the internet.

Today’s generation may be reading more than anyone else in the 1970s and 1980s, Carr claims, however, it is a different kind of reading, and is this different reading helping us? Maryanne Wolf is worried that it isn’t, “[t]he style of reading promoted by the Net. A style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace,” (par. 7). Not only is the Net promoting the need for immediate updates and information, but so is the media. “As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought,” (par. 3). If that statement by Marshall McLuhan was only made in the 1960s, just think how much greater influence the media has on the way we think today. Nick Carr, himself, makes an excellent metaphor of how the internet has affected him, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski,” (par. 3). Carr’s mind now expects to take in information the way the internet distributes it, like “[a] swiftly moving stream of particles.”

Nick Carr makes very interesting claims of how the internet has changed the people who use it, and instead of the internet adapting to us, we are adapting to the it, in which we now think the way the Net does. Carr ends his article with Kubrick’s dark prophecy, “[a]s we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence,”