Is Google Making Us Stupid? - response

Nicholas Carr, in his essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" discusses the issue of how the internet, today's new main form of reading, is changing the way we think, as well as the way way we learn. But, as we are discovering, "[t]he human brain is infinitely malleable[,] (par. 13)" Carr insists. For the way we read and intake information, affects they way we think and write. Carr talks of Friedrich Nietzche and the affect a purchase of a typewriter had upon his works. Nietzche, responding to a friends observation on this change noticed, his prose "changed from arguements to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style" (par. 12). This is a great example Carr uses of how a simple thing like the transition from writing to typing had upon Nietzche's work.

But this change is going on on a much larger scale. Carr talk's of Frederick Winslow Taylor, and how he was the Industrial Revolution's long awaited philospher (par. 23), and how he found the most effecient way to have factory workers work, to maximize productivity. The workers complained of these robotic motions, but the speed of the work they did, made the executives very happy, and this philosophy was kept up. Fastforwarding to now, Google is trying to apply this "Taylorism" to thought. "What Taylor Did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the mind" (par. 25). And this, to Nicholas Carr, is why Google is making us stupid. It is trying to, when Carr uses Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt's words, is "striving to 'systemize everything'" (par. 25).

With all of our brains being "systemized," there won't be space for free thought, and creativity, and that is why Google is making us less intelligent, according to Carr.