Nicholas Carr "Is Google Making Us Stupid"

Nicholas Carr in his essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” talks about how the internet is very mind controlling. He believes if you spend too much time surfing the Web you will most likely stop reading books altogether. Carr talks about a Pathologist who states “[A] blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it” (par 6). Carr seems to believe technology is taking over our minds.


“In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock” (Carr par 15). By stating this Carr is saying we no longer listen to ourselves, we listen to the clock, the web, etc,. By getting up when the clock tells us, like in the example or reading what may pop up while you are online, instead of a book that we should read.


“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 words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski’” (Carr par 4) When Carr states this he is talking about how he used to read deeper into the books, not just skim over the words. The internet has changed the way he reads.


Carr explains “When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating like ‘clockwork.’ Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating like ‘computers’” (par 16). When Carr explains this he is saying we depend more on the computer then on our own brains. Because we have started to believe our brain is telling us what the computer actually is.