Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr

(Below: Persistence of Time by Salvador Dali )

In this essay, Nicholas Carr poses the question of whether or not websites such as Google, the Internet and computers in general are making us less intelligent. Carr opens with the observation that the more time he and many of the people he interviewed spent on the computer, it became harder for them to stay focused and think about a long essay and/or book while reading it. Because I don't really spend that much time on the computer (other than that spent on maintaining this blog) I hadn't really noticed this happening to me, but I can see where his point of view is coming from. Nicholas then puts up an opinion that these problems being experienced with focus may be caused by the fact that when one is on the Internet there is a "staccato quality" to the facts and information that one is observing (only taking in the main points), so when one goes to read a long book or article, he/she ends up skimming it for the main points automatically. What I took out of this and what I've observed with sites such as Google, Wikipedia, etc., is that these sites are making it easy for us to find out facts and answers without having to obtain conclusions for ourselves, leaving out all of the details of the situation and succumbing us to a sort-of spoon-fed literacy. As Nicholas points out psychologist Maryanne Wolf shows that we are not only "what we read" but "we are how we read", meaning that if we skim over the Internet, we are bound to skim over a book or article. Another good point that Mr. Carr brought up was that of an observation made by one of Friedrich Nietzsche's good friends, who noticed that Nietzsche's writing style became "tighter (and) more telegraphic" as Nietzsche switched from writing with pen and paper to writing with a typewriter. From what I've observed, this is most likely because when one is writing with pen and paper they are expending more effort than it takes to type on a typewriter or computer, so one in turn thinks about and explores what one is writing. Later in the article, I was intrigued by when Mr. Carr observed the movement in the 14th century from life without the mechanical clock to life with mechanical clocks. He then quotes Joseph Weizenbaum who observes how when the mechanical clock came around "we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock" in our daily lives, in effect become slaves to schedules and time. This is a very scary idea to me because it is true that time has come to control society, everything that we do tends to run on a schedule, leaving the clock, not us, in control of our lives. Then, Nicholas brings up the idea of, starting in the Industrial Revolution, men becoming machines. He observes how it all started with Frederick Winslow Taylor who made an "algorithm" to calculate what workers at a machinery factor must do in order to keep productivity at a maximum, looking at men like they were machines themselves. Also, Mr. Carr looks at the subject of this article, Google, and how, in their own words, they are striving to "build artificial intelligence" that may, in the future replace peoples' brains! This to me seems like a joke, I mean it is just absurd that anyone would want to replace human thought with "the perfect search engine", in effect devaluing human consciousness and existence in general. To add to this thought, they are overlooking the idea that if these artificial brains replaced our own, the machines would be our consciousness, living our lives for us, and we would become the machines or the vehicles necessary for the artificial brains to survive. It all sounds like a sci-fi movie gone wrong to me, and I believe it is completely bogus. Finally, I thought the main thing to take out of this article was a quote by playwright Richard Foreman at the end of the article, stating that as we move from spoken and written information to Internet streaming we are becoming "pancake people-spread wide and thin", meaning as we open ourselves to this vast amount of information, we come to know a lot but not a lot about what we know.