Summary of Nicholas Carr's Essay by Alexandria

Nicholas Carr’s Essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid” was featured in The Atlantic in 2008. Nicholas states that our mind has changed dramatically in the time that we have immersed ourselves in the new technology advancement. Carr declares “My mind isn’t going –so far as I can tell-but it’s changing” (p1). I believe he means that his mind is still the same but his way of thinking has changed once he started going online. He demonstrates this by describing how he was able to read a book without his mind wandering; now he can’t even read a few paragraphs with out becoming distracted. In my opinion, this is happening to more people at a faster rate in one way or another. I struggle to focus when I am trying to study. My mind will drift off to what I’m going to do next weekend instead of concentrating on the task. This started happening to me when I began to text and use the computer. Nicholas Carr expresses that the computer has become very beneficial, but it could be at a steep price. This price he shows is that it could be making it harder to have deep concentration and make us victims to being easily distracted. This could be an act that the government is assisting, because if we are unable to detect their intentions, then we can become victims to consumerism. After all, the internet can be used by the government to see what we are interested in, and they can use the Internet to feed our minds their ideology. That way they can make money off of their naïve citizens. How can this be possible? Carr describes how the Internet has changed many peoples’ way of thinking. They have the same mind but they are unable to have the type of deep concentration, because the Internet promotes a scattered mind set.
Some people in this world believe that technology has become so great, that eventually it would be better to just permit technology to take over. In Nicholas Carr’s essay he states “Still, their assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling” (p4). I believe he is saying that it is truly troubling if we believe a computer, which man made, to have more intelligence then its creators. In my opinion, Carr is warning us that Google has the potential to allow us to become lazy and not allow us to develop the ability to deeply analyze, because it is being designed to do every thing for us. It leaves me to question whether we truly are losing our intelligence, because we are so at ease with the thought of permitting a computer to become better than the human mind.

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