Reading Responce #2

In Nicholas Carr's article, in Atlanitic Magazine, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" He starts off with a comic strip between the characters, the supercomputer "HAL" and the implacable atronaut "Dave Bowman" We find the characters in a scene where they have had a close call due to the malfunctioning machine. The computer HAL is "dieing" so to speak, he looks to Dave and says, "Dave, my mine is going."

Carr's central claim is that our minds are being reprogramed and we are turning to reliant on the computer, and loosing our deep thoughts. He talks about how our reliance on the computer has made it hard for our brains to properly work. Over the past few years he feels as if his mind has become reprogramed, he is unable to focus on things such as deep reading without his mind wondering and getting caught up in the turns of the argument. Very concerned, he babbles on about how Sergey and Larry Page, the founders of Google, desire to turn the search engine into an artifiial intelligence, such as the character, "HAL" and how it might be conneceted to our brains. Carr goes into to talking about how due to us relying on the internet to do our thinking for us, we have no more time for our own deep thought, we are becoming robotic.


In my opinion, the internet has given us a voice, not turned it into a robotic thought process. We are able to voice our opinions to thousands across the world. Google can be a tool for us to back up our facts, or to learn something new. Yes! we are filling our head with more information, but how is that a bad thing? We still can take our own opinion off of whatever we read, and use the internet to blog about such opinions. Google is filled with links to articles, facts, so many things to fill our brains with knowledge. How has learning ever been a bad thing? We can back up our arguments with the facts that we find, we can learn new things everyday.

I do agree that it is harder for some people today to really sit down and get into some deep reading, and our thought process has been changed. A lot of us do tend to have wondering minds when it comes time to finally sit down and delve into a deep book.
However, I don't believe it doesn't prove us becoming, "Robotic." Our minds are wondering because our thought process has sped up so much and we are constant thinkers. This doesn't mean it is imposible for us to sit down and get lost in a book anymore, just some of us do have a struggle with it now and then.

In my opinion, Google is not taking away our thought process, it helping us build it.