Is Google Making us Stupid? Response Blog

Reading a title like “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, had me hooked from the get go. I started to think to myself…IS Google making me and everyone else who relies on it stupid? What makes this article much more thought provoking is the fact that it is relatable. I thought about the how recently Wikipedia decided to protest by doing a blackout…honestly, I realized how god darn much I use Wikipedia and how helpful it is when I need a quick answer, it was almost tedious to try and get my information elsewhere, when all I needed was to know who someone was or what a company did. Also, I felt like Carr was personally describing me as he said that he used to be able to ready lengthy texts, and that now that he was used to the rapidity of the internet his “concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages” (Carr 1). I just can’t do it anymore. I always need a break or find myself doing something else when I’m trying to read a long article, especially if it is academic related. I know I have to do it, but it takes quite a bit of perseverance to finish sometimes. As Carr says ,“deep reading . . . has become a struggle” (Carr 1). Carr accentuates the fact that the Internet indeed does give us unlimited access to a rich store of easily available information, and we’ve become accustomed to this. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration . . . “ (Carr 1). It’s true. I wouldn’t say Google makes us stupid; we are just becoming lazier because we’ve become used to quick, accessible information and we find it tedious to do look in libraries, and long articles. Who can really blame us? But, this isn’t necessarily a good thing to become so used to. When we are faced with situations in which this commodity isn’t available we find it quite wearisome. Just like Carr says, we’ve become programmed to be used to a few clicks giving us all of the possible information possible, and we “fight to stay focused”  (Carr 2) when it comes to a tedious, time consuming situation.  Instead of deep reading, we have gotten used to skimming texts. Honestly, although this is true, I also believe that one still has the capacity and the tendency to read thoroughly. Just like anyone in search for information, whether it be from a book or a website, one skims the information to see if it is useful enough to read in depth. Carr stresses the fact that the way our modern, Western brains work has changes; they’ve been reprogrammed. Of course, technology changes we change, but the way a human thinks never changes; instead, the way we go about our tasks or how we choose to access information has changed, but this is only because we have the ability to do so. Honestly the question, is Google making us stupid is stupid itself. A search engine can’t make a human being stupid; lazy, yes we have become accustomed to certain commodities, but that doesn’t make us stupid…it makes us practical. Another one of Carr’s main ideas is that the computer is a form of artificial intelligence that is supplementing the human brain, and possible even replacing it. He insinuates that the computer thinks for us, but let’s be honest. One MUST think in in order to intelligently use the Internet and its sources for the Internet to be used correctly. The Internet or Google didn’t think up this blog, I did.