Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Sheila McElroy

Reading Response 2

Is Google Making Us Stupid? By Nicholas Carr

I believe that Carr’s project in this essay illustrates how the evolution of technology may have permanent repercussions in how we accept and process knowledge. Carr reports several very impressive examples of how the Internet has changed the way our brain reacts to deep reading versus power browsing, the fidgetiness that we display flitting from one website to another versus spending hours reading long narratives and contemplating what they mean. Carr also compares how some of us “watch” the Internet much the same way that we used to “watch” the clock and depend on it to tell us when to eat, sleep, work, and live. Technology has taken over all aspects of our lives.

What is Carr’s “Central Claim”? He emphasizes that he has sensed a change in the way he thinks. How he feels that his brains’ neural circuitry is being remapped and his memory reprogrammed. He struggles to concentrate on whatever he is reading if it is of any length at all. He wants to expose to us that, even though we, the human race, feel technology advances are cool, we may not be seeing how our abilities to analyze and be critical are significantly decreasing. If you really think about it, society has become reliant on getting information quickly, the faster the better, as some of us need to be able to get 26 ½ hours worth of living done in 24 hours. Somehow our genetic make-up has to change to accommodate how we now need to speed-analyze reading.

Carr cites many authorities who provide evidence to what he ponders. There are 2 that stand out the most to me. One is from Plato’s Phaedrus. “Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, ‘cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.’” In this quote Socrates finds the written word to be dumbing his civilization, but then word of mouth that was the basis for learning. As I am today, there is no way that I would have been able to listen to an orator and “get it”. I am just the opposite. I am a seer. I have to read or look at a problem to absorb it or solve it. I can’t have someone describe it to me. This causes me to believe that our civilization has not been dumbed by technology; we have just changed the way that we absorb the information. The other is from James Olds, a professor of neuroscience at George Mason University. He observed, that although researchers thought our mental meshwork was largely fixed by adulthood, in actuality, the adult mind “is very plastic. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.” Meaning, that our brains have the ability to adapt quickly to outside sources, leading me to conclude that I have definitely learned to “focus” and “tune out” all the commotion around me, or so my family says. I see this as being a direct instance where Old’s ideal has proven right.