Is Google Making Us Stupid?
The author of this work is Nicholas George Carr who was born in 1959. He is a writer who has written many articles and books which concentrates on the issues to do with technology. He became prominent in 2003 when he reviewed the article entitled,’ IT does not Matter’. He has continued writing many articles that talk about technological issues and their impacts on the users. In his work’s Google Making Us Stupid’, he figures out the impact of Google on its users and figures out the real situation at the moment. He picks out prominent persons who confess how Google has transformed or changed their reading and researching habits. The aim of this study is to identify whether Google has made its users stupid or not.
Carr came to realize that the use of Google by researchers, academicians and other scholars tend to have a lasting effect on such individual that may be dangerous to their career requirements or may negatively affect the traits that they had prior to the use of the Google search machine n their respective activities.
Thesis Statement: To identify how whether Google is making people stupid and illustrate or explain the findings.
Very many views are voiced by some of the prominent users of Google who claim that continuous use of this search machine for academic or career based activities tend to transform or change their reading or writing skills because some claim that Google has made work even easier for them as they necessarily need to go to libraries and go through many books or maybe conduct extensive research since they can access that useful information within some minutes.
In most places, people are solely reliant on Google for their research related issues; this spirit must have had an origin since an idea or event cannot originate from a vacuum; it must have originated from a given source. The issue of people being parasites on the net has originated from globalization and improvements in technology which have made the cost of information and communication low, increased access to vital information and reduced the amount of time that one has to wait before receiving or sending information of a given nature.
Many scholars and academicians are also of the view that Google has made its users stupid in a way due to the kind of confessions they air out. Someone like Bowman says that he also shares the same opinion with Carr that over the past few years, he thinks that something might have been tinkering with his brain destroying his memory and understanding. He argues that he can feel that problem especially when reading since he finds himself unable to spend a substantial amount of time reading as was the case previously.
He argues that all these problems are as a result of spending most of his time online where he searches and surfs the relevant information that he wishes to gather at that moment. That due to this he finds himself unable to read a lot or subjective his minds to intensive thinking since the net seem to have all the answers that he requires. Another victim of Google is Bruce Friedman who claims that as a result of the internet he has totally lost the ability to read and absorb; he says that he cannot read even a three page article and that he feels his thinking capacity has reduced over the last decade as a result of overreliance on Google for his pathologist studies and activities at the university of Michigan.
The argument put forward by Nicholas George Carr is also supported by Daniel Bell who happens to be a sociologist, he claims that events like the invention of the mechanical clock back in the 14th century has an effect on its users since it has dissociated time from the users and help to create a situation where users tend to believe in the independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. This portrays that this invention has reduced individuals time estimating capacities as most the users solely depend on the clocks (Miller, Vandome & McBrewster 142).
Maryanne Wolf who is a developmental psychologist argues that we are what we read and that once we stop reading then our thinking and reasoning shall drop drastically, she is worried about what the internet is turning its users into. Italian Humanities Hieronimo is worried about the technological inventions which according to him seem to discourage reading among a large group of society members; he says that these inventions will make the users be less studious thus weakening their minds.
The author of this article, Nicholas Carr argues that the idea that the minds of internet users is subjected to extremely high-speed data processing alters the brain content of the majority of these users; that the more they surf the more Google, and other companies increase the information available to surfers. He argues that these online research companies like Google aims at encouraging leisurely reading or slow and concentrated thought; this is so because these companies are majorly concerned with their financial obligations at the expense of the tremendous effects on the users.
Carr looks back to the traditional, western culture in which there were many scholars where individuals were well educated and articulate personality unlike the current culture that is made up of people who readily accesses information which he claims has drained their inner reparation of dense cultural inheritance.
One of the methods of development used is the cause and effect method; Carr is trying to put across the effects of using Google search machine and the internet in general for academic or research based issues. He says that the effect of using the internet shall make the users stupid. He says that; ‘…a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the west. (But now) I see within us all the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of…’. This portrays how people have changed over the years as a result of the internet; it is an effect of internet use.
The author has also used the description method to create a clear impression in the reader’s mind of the issues surrounding the use of the internet and stupidity of the users; he uses many examples to explain his argument and also quotes what others have said about the topic and clearly describes and explains the situation ‘Users of the internet are subjected to extraordinarily fast data processing, which alters their brain’. It is descriptive in the sense that it describes what happens to the users.
Conclusion
Nicholas Carr is right in his proposal that Google use will make the users stupid because many people seem to have forgotten the art of reasoning because they believe that they do not have to bother themselves so much and yet the internet has all the answers. People’s reading and researching cultures had significantly reduced and due to that the level of stupidity had risen because people are not much knowledgeable as they were, some years before Google was put in place.