Reading Response #4

In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” Nick Carr makes several important claims. However, in my opinion his two most important claims are his claim about the intentions of internet companies and his overall claim about how Google affects people.

As Nick Carr says “Most of the proprietors of the commercial internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link – the more crumbs, the better. The last thing internet companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It is in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.” (GMUS) Carr's claim is that because internet companies have so much invested in people visiting different websites, and thus seeing different advertisements in the side bars of these websites, they are willing to design websites with the intention of the reader needing to go to to another website after viewing the one they are currently on. This earns the internet companies more money because of all the other companies paying for advertising space on their websites.

Another important claim that Carr makes is what I believe to be his central claim for this article. Carr state that “In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on the computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” (GMUS) I believe that Carr's claim is very straight forward and very powerful. Carr's claim is that all of the exposure people have to internet knowledge and how people must navigate from page to page to page to page in order to find what they are looking for, has slowly been building up to the creation of the machinelike people, it has been building up to the loss of our own intelligence and the increase of artificial intelligence.

I disagree with Nick Carr's claim, because I believe that this is just a part of the advancement in technology just like so many other things have. Just as humans have moved on from stone tablets to parchment, we are beginning to move from paper to the internet. I am not saying that we will no longer have a place for books, at least not in the near future. Books are still a great resource and very some people a more enjoyable method of harvesting information. But the internet much faster and more efficient then books, and for most people a Google search fits the bill. I don't believe that the internet is damaging the they way we think. I simply think that it is a natural change as technology progresses.