Nicholas Carr

Is Google Making Us Stupid?
By Melissa Geneser on Nicholas Carr's essay

“My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but its changing.” ( Nicholas Carr pg. 1 of his essay entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”) Though he is saying here that he doesn't feel that he is becoming stupid, he does state that his mind is changing, but is it for the better? I feel that he is using, Google only as an example, to me he is really meaning technology in general.
Have we become so attached to computer technology, that we can't live without it? He goes on to say later in his essay, “ as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” (pg.7) Can this occurrence be good? I don't think so, we have become like an “ outdated computer,” as Carr puts it. Technology has taken over our life and put the meaning of really understanding things behind us making us concentrate on other more unimportant things. We now have everything at our finger tips and just a click away we have it all, though this is helpful in many ways, it is also part of the decrease in understanding and depth. “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle,” (pg.1) so with all this technology you would think we would be reading more, and so we are. But we are only skimming thing instead of really reading them and understanding the hidden meaning. Carr goes on to say that though we read a great deal more, its a “different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking-perhaps even a new sense of the self.”We are not only what we read, we are how we read.”( say Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Turf University and the author of “Proust and the Squid: True Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”) (pg. 3) So does this mean that if we read with a lazy attitude then that is what we are, lazy? Technology has helped us in so many ways, but has its good outweigh the bad it has caused? My feeling on this subject are similar to that of Carr, but I don't believe that technology is to blame for all of this, its the user who is to blame. Technology is made by man so it can not be to blame, we are the cause for all of this drop in humanities understanding. “Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives,” (pg. 4) this is so true, technology has become a part of everyones lives. We use technology all the time and without it, I think we would all be lost. But why do we have to turn it into a bad thing, if we used technology in the appropriate way, it would be a asset not a hindrance. The thing is to find our how we can use it in the correct manner, and to avoid anymore loss of depth in society.