A brief analysis of Nicholas Carr’s 2008 Article “Is Google Making us Stupid?”

Forgetfulness and difficulty being tentative are just a few of the problems that occur during the rise of the information age. Nicholas Carr, addresses these problems and many more in a 2008 article titled “Is Google making us Stupid?”.
Beginning with a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Carr compares our the pain and frustration of losing or being unable to recall knowledge to the scene in which, super computer HAL responds with discomfort to being disassembled.

Carr then goes on to explain, that far before the omnipotence that is Google, and the internet as we know it today, many other “truthsayers” warned about the further development of the writing.
These “truthsayers” claimed that this emergence of streamlined writing and information would return a sort of false wisdom, and ignorance.
He believes that though there are many ways we have benefited from this sort of “intellectual technology”, we should also be worried. He references Kubicks work again, saying the afformentioned scene mnakes him feel sick.
The reality being that “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”.

We are the proof!

As technology continues to adapt, we find ways to circumvent and optimize performance by cutting corners as a means to expedite the process. This format of learning alters the way we read, process, and use information, not only in a physical sense, but in a mental capacity too.

When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

Carr, N. (2008, January 23). Is Google Making Us Stupid? Retrieved February 7, 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Think about, your decision making process and its likeness. Process based, optimized, and with efficiency at the forefront of our mental. This sort of machine like behaviour is linked to not only what we read, but how we read it.
This means that the same content we read in books, newspapers, and print, is no longer delivered in the same way. The internal satisfaction and contemplation that follows reading a book in your head, instead is replaced with notifications, summaries and advertisements.

“When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed.”

Carr, N. (2008, January 23). Is Google Making Us Stupid? Retrieved February 7, 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

The result:

A less active, simpler minded, less free-thinking brain.

In a world where technology is ever expanding and individual behaviour is lost to the perceived “optimum behaviour” and the hive mind, I believe we are headed toward certain doom. I myself am only 23 at the time of publication, and find myself less tentative in my reading, mildly distracted and always seeking the most convenient route.
While not all of this may be attributed to writing and the internet alone, I cannot dismiss it’s key role in my lack of development, with these being such integral parts of our modern day lives.

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.

Carr, N. (2008, January 23). Is Google Making Us Stupid? Retrieved February 7, 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Attached below are the links to the article, as well as a related video:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/