Summary:" Is Google making us stupid?" by Nicholas Carr

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In Nicholas Carr’s essay “Is Google Making us Stupid?” he notes that the more time he spends online, the harder time he has reading deeply and he struggles with concentration and contemplation.  Carr says that others have felt this too; they report skimming texts instead of sustained attention. Recent studies back up these claims. Carr interviews psychologist Maryanne Wolf who says the Internet, with its emphasis on speed and volume, may be destroying our ability to engage deeply with texts. Carr points out that Nietzsche’s writing style changed after he acquired a typewriter, and even the invention of clocks affected the way people think about themselves and their world. The Internet has changed people’s thinking even more. It has even shaped traditional media to become more like itself. Carr discusses Frederick Winslow Taylor who used a stopwatch to promote efficiency in early factories. His ideas have become the cornerstone of modern industry, and this approach has now come to dominate the Internet, and by extension, thinking.  Google is the best example of this, in its effort to organize everything with the ultimate search engine. Carr wraps up by suggesting that perhaps new technology has always changed the way we think, but then again the Internet’s effect is deep and profound. He fears we have become “pancake people:” wide but thin, and that human intelligence is more and more resembling artificial intelligence.

In the Question of is Google making us Dumb? There is really no definite answer on what exactly Google is doing to people's intelligence. Reading Nicholas Carr's essay made me realize how people today process information. You can say I agree and also disagree to Nicholas Carr. I can agree that people now don't read more into a text in a book, article, or anything that can be read, and that reading will not make you understand what the text or even maybe comprehend the text. But in my opinion, the way Google and any another big corporate social media uses these fast skimming process of reading utilizes a fast way to find important parts of the text. They made processing information more simple and accessible to everyone. Thinking about how Frederick Winslow used his stopwatch to promote efficiency in his industry make me think that the way we use Google now also does the same thing. Google provides a better way to find information in simple text and also provide easy access to the things that people are more interested in. So in conclusion, If you are a type of people who likes to go in detail on what you are reading maybe Google is making you dumb, but if you are a type of person that just want to skim through text and just pick and choose on what you like then Google is not making you dumb but it’s just giving you a faster way to learn.