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“Is Google making us stupid?”

In the article "Is Google Making US stupid," Nicholas Carr argues that as the internet

becomes the medium through which people gather information, their attention span is

negatively affected, their individual thought patterns are distorted, and eventually diminishes

intelligence and culture. He contends, even though the internet has improved the efficiency

with which people find new information, the brain's learning experience is flattened in the

process. He uses numerous examples to reinforce his claim, one of them being his inability to

focus on a piece of reading because he is constantly distracted. To him, the primary role of the

internet is to help big cooperation gather terabytes of data for selfish financial gain without

little regard for the negative impact it has on people's critical thinking skills and attention spans.

Intellectual stimulation has been hampered as Google seeks to create an AI that will essentially

turn humans into robots. Even though I totally agree with Carr’s argument that Google and the

internet at large have improved the speed with which information is accessed, I don't believe

Google is making us stupid. If anything, Google made this one of the smartest generations,
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evidenced by the numerous technological innovations resulting from easy access to

information.

Google is the most consequential technological innovation of the past century. It has

become synonymous with search. It is estimated that there are 5.6 billion search queries on

Google every day. This indicates its influence on people's daily lives. Google has democratized

access to information. It is no longer locked up in vaults, only accessible to people with special

privileges. Gone are the days people have to become card-carrying members of public and

private libraries to get information. Carr himself acknowledges that "research that once

required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries ” is now easily available by simply

typing a topic of interest in the search bar. Supporters of Carr's suppositions propound that

information overload from the internet has negatively affected human's ability to think

critically. Using his example, Carr writes, "I'm not thinking the way I used to think.I can feel it

most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be

easy.My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend

hours strolling through long stretches of prose.That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my

concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin

looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m wayward brain back to the text. The deep

reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” He also cites a study conducted in

the UK that finds reading as a skimming activity and the process of reading more than three or

four paragraphs as tedious. This logic is misguided by intellectual laziness is misguided. The

internet has made it easy to quickly find the information we are searching without going

through tomes of articles that may not be helpful.

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The most stated benefit of the internet is efficiency. However, the desire to quickly

access new information has enervated human's capacity to read deeply and critically. The

internet has led to a world of artificial intelligence where anyone can access information at

their convenience. People have access to information, but they are not really learning. This may

be true to some extent. The reality is google has organized information and made it easily

accessible to everyone, and people can gain knowledge in a shorter period.Furthermore, there

is no empirical evidence that suggests that a person’s cognitive abilities are affected by

spending too much time on the internet. It is a matter of self-discipline if one wants to learn

new information regardless of whether one used the internet or using the physical library.

There has to be recognition that the internet is now the main medium of consuming

information.

People have been raised in a culture where the primary sources of information were

physical books, periodicals, and newspapers. The inventors of the printing press impressed

upon every one that information is only valid if it has been gleaned from a book or newspaper.

However, the invention of the internet drastically changed how people consume information.

The printing press is under serious threat because of the explosion of smartphones, tablets, and

laptops. The younger generation is no longer interested in buying printed books. The preferred

choice is their portable devices. Printed books were viewed as the essential truths for humanity

for half a millennium. The Internet has challenged this fallacy by providing multiple sources for

a particular topic of interest. People like Carr see the loss of reading habits because people are

no longer interested in books. However, this is not true. People have been learning long before

the invention of the printing press. Books often take a long time to write and are even more
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expensive to publish. This means that knowledge based on books takes a long time to develop,

it is scarce, and people cannot quickly raise their concerns. Books only undervalued and ignored

the natural way humans learn, which is through oral interactions and groups. The internet has

made it easy to offer opinions about different topics. Their concerns are quickly addressed, and

new information is generated.A good example is the emergence of open-source that has

revolutionized how new technologies are developed. Innovation has increased tenfold because

people can easily publish source code on the internet, and people can add more modules and

libraries. The most important tool used today is because the internet made it possible for

people to collaborate and share knowledge on a particular area of interest. This would have

been implausible if the internet was not available.

In conclusion, It is very easy to criticize new technology if we feel it challenges the status

quo. This is especially if we do not understand how it affects our human abilities. The method of

accessing information and how we process it has been affected because of the internet. It is a

misnomer to state that brain function is compromised by the constant use of Google to access

information. Google has only increased the speed at which it is accessed. The notion that

people only skim through information without deep reading is false. The internet has made it

possible to find the exact information without reading dozens of irrelevant articles. Google has

made people more intelligent evidence by the numerous technological innovations.

Works Cited

Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic, 23 Jan. 2020,

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