Is Google making us stupid?
I find “Is Google making us stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, persuasive, especially in which he wrote that Google is altering our mental health and personality because of my own experiences and looking at some other people, it pretty convinced me that the internet is changing our personality and I feel like it is making us a little erratic and impatient. But I also agree with Carr's argument that still we can't live without it as it became a very significant part of our lives that we can find everything on Google, from every big article to small little things like how to cut a pineapple for instance. He also pretty convinced me that my searching and finding everything online did make us a very bad reader, and it made it harder for us to read long articles because now you can listen to any audiobooks instead of reading the long paragraphs, articles in magazines or newspapers.
Using Google has made all of us lazy and stressful, as Carr says in his article, “A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.” This quote explains that Google has become an essential part of our lives, and it is destroying our other good habit of reading books and magazines because you can easily find these books and magazines’ summaries, and you don’t have to spend a lot of time reading the whole book or magazine. And the other thing is that you don’t just find one result for your search, you find hundreds or thousands of them, that’s why the habit of reading is fading away from us. Other than making us lazy, Google is also giving us stress when sometimes you can not find anything reasonable with your search. It makes us stressed because you have depended on Google a lot and you tend to find everything on it.
To make his argument Stronger, Carr goes on, “I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances--literary types, most of them--many say they’re having similar experiences” (Carr). This quote proves that some of his friends who are bloggers, like Scott Karp, a blogger on online media, have discontinued reading books altogether. Despite being a lit major throughout college, the web has changed the way he reads and thinks now. As a blogger, you need to research to find facts and for that, they use books sometimes but nowadays it can all be done on the internet by just clicking one button. He also mentions Bruce Friedman, who blogs about the use of computers in medicine, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print”, (Carr). Nowadays, where almost everything could be found online, logically, anyone would prefer reading summaries over a long article and going through every single detail. With the click of a mouse, all the information comes to the individual in short bursts of energy. I can relate to this because I am not a huge fan of reading and am lazy, and for that, I tend to find summaries of articles or book chapters.
Carr extends his argument by saying that people are not even reading the article or things they search for completely, they tend to skim and then read it. Carr started the report of Scholars from University College London, “They found that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.” it is saying that people are not even reading the whole thing they are searching, they are reading parts of it and jump to another article about the same topic, this shows that we have become so lazy that we are not just reading books, we also tend to skim the summaries and article we are finding online to help us for our research or other kinds of stuff.
The internet is not just affecting us mentally, it is also affecting us physically because as you are finding everything on Google, it is making us isolated. We are not going out to make some friends and observe new cultures and people. Carr also believes that we are becoming anti-social and isolated because we are on the internet a lot. Carr explains that the human brain is malleable, as James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that the human adult brain is very like plastic because nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. Car goes on to say, “The brain,” according to Olds, “can reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.” According to Olds, our brain is like plastic, as it has a tendency to break and reconnects itself with more knowledge. As we are surfing more on the internet, it means that our brain is getting more and more information and because of that our knowledge is expanding, and we are becoming more knowledgeable as we are reading different articles from different websites. And also because of this, we know something that we tend to read summaries of the book to make it fully understandable.
In conclusion, the article “Is google making us stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, has taught us that the internet and google have affected us mentally and emotionally and because of this we are losing interest in reading and we are getting isolated. The use of more and more internet has made us less social and there is evidence that Google is tracking us by using the information we provided them. We should start getting concerned about the fact that Google is tracking us and we should stop using the internet a lot because it has affected us mentally and we are losing interest in reading.
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