Reading Response to "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Nick Carr recently wrote an essay titled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” This article goes in depth on the subject of how the internet is changing the way humans process and store information. He writes about his own struggles with being unable to concentrate on a single piece of writing. He claims that the internet feeds us information at such high speeds that our brains are beginning to change; we are less able to concentrate for long periods of time. Carr continues to talk about clocks and when they became available to the public they changed the way most people went about their day. He writes, “When in deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.” I think this is an important and interesting claim. Some people may not realize, but before clocks came into existence humans relied on their senses and the sun to determine when they would wake up, eat and sleep. This claim is crucial to his essay because it shows an example of how technology can so easily change the way people think and act.
Another important claim Carr makes is how text messaging is also changing the way we read. He writes “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970’s or 1980’s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.” In making this statement Carr is not saying that using the internet and text messaging is necessarily a bad thing, in fact he writes that the general public may be writing more then ever before. However, he does say it’s changing the way we read. He states that our brains are becoming less able to concentrate and that this new fast technology is the reason.
I agree that the internet has changed the way we used to read. A point that needs emphasizing since so many people don’t realize how fast their capacity to concentrate is disintegrating. Through television, internet and the overall media the general public is being fed rapid text and images. We have been trained to quickly read something, maybe think about it for a few moments then move onto something else. The days of reading a book by the fire and discussing what we have read with a friend are nearly gone. This means the next generations will rarely experience that kind of reading. This is an inevitable change and, like the clock, we eventually won’t be able to imagine a world without it.