What Google Could Lead To

Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Group, Jul/August 2008. Web. 18 January 2011.

Read this article

Nicholas Carr, author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, believes that the Internet is remapping and changing the way we think. Nicholas tells us that the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a great effort. He starts to get fidgety, and begins to look for something else to occupy his time when he reads long passages. He feels as if he is always dragging his willful brain back to the text. Research that once required days in the stacks or review rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes on the Internet. The author states that “Once he was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now he zips along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University, states that the style of reading on the Internet may be weakening our mental connection that forms when we read deeply and without distraction. Nicholas also feels that a computers ability of storing information causes people not to use their memory to its full potential. Nicholas feels that he can get more out of reading a book in a quiet room, than reading online and having millions of distractions just a click away on the internet.

In this article Nicholas appears to believe that the Internets easy accessibility to answers has and will continue to make people lazy and not use their brain to its full potential. In a interview with Newsweek Sergey Brin, a gifted young man who founded Google said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Nicholas feels that in the online world there is little place of contemplation and uncertainty that is needed to make people interact with one another. Socrates states that people are “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” The author feels that the Internet only seems to be chipping away his capacity for concentration and contemplation. Many of the author’s buddies have said the more they use the Internet, the more they have to battle to pay attention on long pieces of writing because Google search engine makes people not have to use their brain as much as they would in a world without Google.