response to Nicholas Carr

In his paper, "Is Google Making us Stupid" Nicholas Carr tries to get across what happens when people spend all their time on the internet, or reading online.


Carr claims to have noticed a lack of concentration or focus when reading written texts, and believes that it is because you can find all your needed information online in much less time than reading. "Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of the libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after." (par. 2) What Carr is saying is that the need to focus on text of any kind is no longer there. We can obtain almost whatever information we need with a few clicks of a mouse.

However some feel that their ability to focus on things for more than a short period of time is lacking. "Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the internet has altered his mental habits.’I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,' he wrote earlier this year."(par.5) this adds to Carr's opinion because it is someone's personal story as to how the internet has affected their thought process.

This paper provides a lot of back-up research, and not just stories. Paragraphs 6-8 talk about scientific studies that have been done to show the effects of the internet on the human thought process. "It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of 'reading' are emerging as users 'power browse' horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts..." (par.7) This shows that many people only skim through the things they find online, hoping to move on to the next best thing.

This paper illustrates how many people spend a lot of time online looking at whatever they want/can, however they do not absorb as much as a person who only reads written texts. Carr is stating that the internet in interfering with our ability to concentrate.