Nick Carr's Reading Response

In Nicholas Carr’s piece, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Carr explains how the computer and the Internet are influencing way our minds work and the way we think. He also explains how reading on the Internet is preventing people from “deep reading” because when reading articles and blog posts people are mainly skimming over the words and only focus on the first few paragraphs before clicking on to the next site.

On page 3 of Carr’s, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, he states, “The human brain almost infinitely malleable.” I agree with this statement because there are several different influences over the way people think or view things. Computers and technology are not the only influences that are playing a part in how people think, but there are things such as advertisements or peer pressure. For example, make up advertisements can make women feel insecure about the way they look, lowering their self-esteem. As a result, they buy the product because in their minds they think they need it to feel prettier. And people’s peers influence how people think incredibly. The majority of teens almost always follow the crowd and end up believing what teens have labeled as “cool”. These senses of what things are “cool” changes all the time, which in turn, is influencing the minds of the other teens.

Another interesting claim Carr makes in this same article is on page 4 in which he states, “When the Net absorbs a medium…It injects the medium’s content with hyberlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.” This claim is interesting to me because I can relate to that experience of jumping from site to site and being distracted by all the different sorts of media that is being displayed on the Internet. So I agree with the statement about how the Net injects the medium’s content, but I disagree with the statement that the result is to scatter our attention and distract the readers. I disagree with this because I believe that the reason there is so many advertisements and mediums on the Net is not to purposely distract the viewers but because the media is radically increasing and shifting so there is so much information to be distributed and all the different companies are distributing the information all at once. So the result is distraction, but I don’t think the distraction is intentional.

Overall, this article explains some valid points about how computers and the Internet are influencing the minds of the people today, some of which can be controversial.