While analyzing the article I came across multiple points that are worth reflecting on. Carr goes over some good and arguable points about how the internet and google is somehow making people more stupid. His explanations all make perfect sense for the world of today. However, he fails to realize some very important things as to what technology has done for the develop of learning and other resources.
First, Carr depicts a time when we would always be able to read books for hours on end but now people can barely get through a few pages of reading material before they lose their focus. Carr says, “That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.” Carr is explaining how he would be able to read books for hours on end and he would become lost in the world of reading the material, but now that technology has developed, and makes everything so much faster, as in searching up answers, he often finds himself losing attention. What he is referring to is the fact that people now a-days tend to rely more on their phones than they do reading a book. This being because, technology is so much faster than reading through books, and majority of today’s population is too lazy to read through information to find the answer they were looking for.
Today if someone were to read a book then they would struggle to be able to because they get bored really fast and would lose interest almost immediately because they are addicted to their smartphones, which they constantly need to be Staring at. Once they put their phone away, they become a fiend to pull it out almost instantaneously, this being just to play games on their phone, text their friends, or just go on social media. They would instead just use google to find the quote in which they are trying to read for. Another example that really stood out to me is when he is talking about how research used to be conducted back in the day, about how people would work for hours on their research to ensure it would be completed but he says that everyone googles things and they don’t put in the time or effort.
Carr says “Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes” . Carr is saying that people use google as a simpler option and that research that was once hard to find is now becoming easily accessible. While this fact is true I would say that this is also a good thing, because if researchers would to spend lots of time into their research (which they already do) it would be a waste of time to try and figure out something that has already been done. In This context google can be used as a very valuable tool because if I were to try and test something out, why would I waste all the time and effort when I could’ve just used the results of another person who conducted the same research? I would rather save time and effort just be sure that the research I am conducting hasn’t been done already. Furthermore, Carr gives a little snippet about how he feels about Google’s ads and the way they are shown. Carr says, “The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.” (para 20). What Carr is initially saying is how google takes advantage of how many links we click by displaying ad after ad. I agree with Carr because when I myself go onto to google every link I click has multiple ads on the page, they are very inconvenient, and they always take up space and make site seeing very inconvenient for the user. The ads themselves are not very appealing ads sometimes they often contain sexual content and it just distracts the user from the objective that they are trying to achieve. By doing this, it is making the user more prone to be distracted with little things instead of focusing in the topic at hand, they would rather click on the ads because they are visually appealing and it causes little progress to be made if not none at all.
In Carr’s analysis, he does a good job of illustrating how different creations of technology throughout the history of us (humans), like when he talks about the mechanical clock and how it has altered the way humans perceive and understand the world we live in today. These new creations of technology can fundamentally change how we think. Carr carries a very persuasive argument throughout his article, But I honestly think Carr goes too far into this argument. Although I agree that google and the internet is reducing our ability to concentrate and go into deep reading and the way we process information. Carr fails to assert the idea that rise of new technology is re-wiring our brains and modes of cognition to become more computer like along with the rest of the world. This article had many great points, but I see this more as an opinion piece rather than a empirically justified argument.
In the article “Is Google Making us Stupid?”, Personal discipline has a very significant role in how we use the internet. There are very many arguments that the internet will destroy our attention span and critical thinking, we can still avoid those outcomes. These advantages do make our lives easier, but they come with a cost. Our critical thinking, attention span etc.… could be in danger. Even though there are these dangers, we could still prevent them in the way we use the internet. I think the internet is of great benefit to us we should not abuse it.
