Reading Response #2

4/13/2010

Cai Pencil

Reading Response #2 “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr expresses his concern for “how the Internet affects cognition”, in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I think that the central claim is well explained in a quote from Carr base on the words of Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The story and science of the reading brain” as Nicholas Carr phrases “Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency and “immediacy above all else, may weaken our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long complex works of prose commonplace”. So as the internet is supposedly tampering with the way that we think, is the reality of a common science fiction scenario of desensitized society of humans (which Carr himself obviously fears. Made clear by his saying so), a possible future for us?

Carr suggests that based on a experiment which demonstrates “that readers of ideograms, such as Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet,” he believes that the circuitry created by reading books will most likely be a very different set of wiring sequences than that of which is created through the Internet. With this idea in place, Nicholas Carr brings our attention to Frederich Winslow Taylor, the revolutionary mathematician in the industrial world. As Frederich Winslow Taylor is thought to be the father of a revolutionary “System” of efficiency (a system created by a mathematical break down of how long a particular job should take to minimize wasted time), it is a commonplace that is the ethic of companies today. Google, being the empire it is, it would only make sense that they are perfecting the art of efficiency. It is apparent that Google has a hierarchy of this efficiency and convenience casted over the Internet. As this technology gives us the ability of efficiently surfing the web, scanning over advertisements, headlines, media, emails(which are full of ads and quick links, along with almost everything on the Net), and classified ads, our circuitry changes from that traditional deep reading to a very scattered sense of searching and naturally, a short attention span. This brief explanation of the Internets affects on our cognition and the events in which explains the way the world is today makes for a convincing point to why this new way of life may stunt our ability to think with the analytical thought concepts of our close ancestors. In conclusion, this may make us rethink the way that we look at the convenience of technology.

I do agree with the apparent distractions the Internet creates. My own personal experience with the world of the wide web definitely involves a large serving of surfing (Googling, classified ads, news, etc). This with the combination of watching TV programming riddled with advertisement on a regular basis, has for me, seems to be more than reasonable explanation of the scattered thought pattern of me and my fellow World Wide Web browsers. I do however have to express my opinion that it is really up to us as a consumers of such a resource. Yes, we are going to have to learn to deal with the modern life style living in unity with a database so vast and resourceful but corrupt with marketing schemes set out to distract us from what we first logged on to do without getting distracted. It is up to us as human being to protect our intellectual culture of deep thinkers from the shallow skimming of the surface (as Carr suggests, it’s like being on “jet skis”). We must commit ourselves to spend time reading lengthily prose to exercise our cognition. After all practice makes perfect right?