Reading Response 4, Nick Carr article

In Nick Carr’s article , “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he deeply explains what the internet is doing to our brain’s. He also makes clear that deep reading these days has changed for him greatly, now not being able to focus in when reading a couple pages. Nick Carr also uses examples of how technology is changing our lives. In the article Nick Carr references Lewis Mumford from his article, “Technics and Civilization”, about a clock. In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr states, “The clocks methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man.” What Nick Carr is basically trying to point out is that clocks are starting to take over our day. We are living by a clock, rather our bodies. If it wasn’t for a clock we wouldn’t be waking up so early to be going to work or school. If it was up to our bodies we would be getting that extra few hours of sleep that are greatly needed for us to function properly during the day. Now we just depend on clocks so we can get up and about, not listening to our bodies trying to pull you back under the covers.

Deeper into the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nick Carr talks about Fredrick Winslow Taylor. Taylor carried around a stopwatch and started playing around with how efficient the workers at the Midvale steel plant in Philadelphia could work if they worked off time from the stopwatch. Through the years this practice soon evolved through many different companies so that they could be more and more efficient. Soon enough this technology reached Google. As it says in the article, “Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California-the Googleplex- is the Internets high church, and the religion practiced inside the walls is Taylorism. According to Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, it’s “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement.” Being one of the most popular internet sites ever, and the most used search engine, Google is constantly doing different experiments to make themselves more efficient, even though they are at the top of the Internet search engine chain. With thousands and thousands of different experiments a day, Google can pretty much safely say that they are the “perfect search engine.” Thanks to Frederick Winslow Taylor, everything will be more efficient.

This article does a good job of explaining how these forms of technology are changing the way we are living today. From the clock waking us up every morning, to Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s method of efficiency with the stopwatch. These thing’s as well as the internet and Google are changing our everyday lives.