Has The Internet Altered Our Society?

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Group, July/Aug 2008. Web. 17 Jan. 2010.

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In the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr has a fear that people have lost their depth in understanding the works of literature in our society. He is skeptical about the Internets way of providing articles, readings, journals, literature; etc because he fears it has changed our way of thinking. He compares the methodical use of the Internet to that of the clock by saying that instead of “relying on our senses”, people began to “decide when to eat, sleep, work, and to rise by obeying the clock” (Paragraph 15). Furthermore, he said that people began to change their way of thinking “like clockwork” (Paragraph 16). Carr makes the comparison to the Internet by examining how people’s way of information-processing is changing. Although he claims himself to be a “worrywort” like that of Plato, he fears that future generations will rely heavily on Google and any other form of information search engine in order to receive a very “skimmed” summary of a topic (Paragraph 32). While search engines can be efficient and time managing, Carr is not quite sure if the conceptual understanding of the information will be obtained at the depth that a physical book may offer. Therefore, Carr has a very skeptical point of view. He does not disagree with Google or prohibit its use, but rather wonders if search engines are the best possible supplement for the human brain, or will our society one day refer to the human way of thinking as “Google-work”?

In this particular article, Carr focuses on the ways that the Internet has altered our society from the past to the present. He mentions in the last paragraph that his biggest fear is a scene in the movie 2001 when the “humans go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency”. Carr fears that our culture will lack philosophical depth and the capacity to think critically about life. Carr worries that without filling our minds with rich and meaningful texts, our culture will take away our ability to gain the intellectual abilities to understand a concept in-depth rather than on the surface. He feels as though our culture will be one that knows “a little about a lot” rather than “a lot about a little”. Moreover, the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are very intellectual in Carr’s point of view. He respects their abilities to use a search engine that can enable people to find just about anything and may one day be linked to our brains. However, Carr agrees with Maryanne Wolf when she says that “deep reading is better for us for more than just the intelligence” but it is also good for the “quiet space that allows the reader to focus”. While Carr respects both the Internet and “deep reading” as means of processing information, he wants to challenge our culture to try and look beyond what a computer understands about the world so that we will not display an “artificial intelligence”. Although he is not against using a computer for a means of research, he does not feel as though our culture should rely on it alone for our means of information and deep thinking.