Google: Helping or Dumbing Us?

In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he talks about how Google and the Internet are impacting our entire lives.  This article is about how the Web can distract us to the very extreme that our brains are changing.  This is happening because we can get any kind of information we need within the click of a button.  Carr also talks about while we are reading a long piece of writing nowadays, we get distracted or bored to the point where we either start doing something else that interests us, or simply begin to skim the writing.  

In this article, there is a part that says “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” This quote shows that we can do anything we want so quickly. I also love this quote because it is comparing the past to the present. The past being so hard-working, and the present being so quick that we just glide right along.

This article also says “…not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today that we did in the 1970’s or 1980’s…” This part really made me think how much I text each day. Personally, I receive/send an average of 382 texts per day. Text messaging is (for the most part) all abbreviations, which is “dumbing” us down in my opinion. I believe that Google has both the impact to dumb us down but also to help us. It is dumbing us down by not letting us use our resources like we did a few years ago even. I found this article very hypocritical because while he was talking about how we cannot concentrate on long writings, he wrote a 7.5 page paper, which I found difficult to read. Therefore, this article was very true in the sense that we get distracted awfully easily. I found myself dragging on and even at one point I ended up reading a magazine at one point in the middle of the piece. This article made me kind of sad in a way because it showed and made me realized how much we do depend on the computers and technology and that we are not as independent as we used to be even 10 years ago. This article makes me think why can’t we use the resources and use our brains to do stuff? Why are we so lazy now?

All in all, I’m very glad we read this article to make us think about how to be smarter than the internet and use our brains so that we are intelligent.  The world should care about this because it is our future.