Nicholas Carr Ethos And Logos

Often I have asked myself is it a good thing that I can have any question answered within seconds without even working for my answer? Obviously, most people would say why not? Why make things harder for yourself? I will highlight for you in the following written words how Nicholas Carr successfully uses ethos, logos, and pathos in his writing to show as a society we are selling ourselves short on learning capabilities.
According to Nicholas Carr, we are all falling into the trap of receiving knowledge without questioning its sources and not being able to think for ourselves. Is having sources like Google making us stupid? As a society we should be able to educate ourselves on our own without answers being spoon-fed to us on demand.
Carr begins
his article with a great pathos approach of comparing todays society to becoming like Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey. He uses the analogy of how we would feel if someone tinkered with our brain and we didn’t know it. Then he relates to this by stating that often times he finds his mind wandering and not knowing why. In addition to this, when needing to make an argument, his first thought is to check with Google first. Carr poses the question: Are companies like Google manipulating our minds without our knowledge; so that we will subconsciously confer with Google before our own minds? Have we become co-dependent on search engines doing our thinking for us?
By using this pathos approach, it pulls on the reader’s emotions of paranoia and self-consciousness. It forces the reader to ask if they really are thinking for themselves? One of his statements stuck out to me,” Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.” As the reader I feel a connection with Carr that he realized that things are not as they used to be when it comes to reading capabilities. He then continues, “That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.” This was a man who once would spend hours reading, and it was not a challenge.
I am emotionally invested as a reader asking how and why did this happen? Is he right? Does this happen to me? This is because Carr has appealed to my emotions making me, the reader, paranoid and questioning my learning methods.
Carr then continues on to give an logos approach to this topic, by asking his friends and colleagues that are writers as well, if they struggle with this phenomenon as well. Across the board it was a consensus that everyone’s reading ability was not what it was once before. These were people who once excelled in their fields partially due to being able to read and retain information easily.
For the reader who would argue that this could simply be a coincidence, and these people were his friends.
They could have easily altered their answers to fit the question better. So Carr reinforces this study with a ethos approach by referring to a five-year research program in London. This program identified that people were skimming instead of reading documents fully.
We have our direct problem. I can definitely relate to skimming 80 percent of things that I am “supposed” to read. Carr has appealed to his readers in two different ways: first, by giving a personal testimony of struggling to read and recall information; and second, as supporting the claim that others do the same through a college-based research program.
Carr has done an effective job of highlighting a growing problem in our society, that we are too heavily dependent on sources like Google giving us the answers right away. In return we are in a constant skimming practice, and are neglecting to fully read things. He says that we have essentially drained ourselves of this inner repertory of dense culture inheritance. We have relied so much on sources like Google to solve our problems, that we have forgotten how to analyze, research, and recall information
easily.
Do we want to end up like Stanley Kubrick’s The Space Odyssey? I most certainly do not. As a society we should be able to educate ourselves on our own without answers being spoon-fed to us on demand. Carr is not disproving the usefulness of Google, he is simply pointing out that we are allowed to think for ourselves. We don’t have to take answers given to us for face value, we are allowed to look behind the curtain and discover why.