The Consequences Of Thinking In Nicholas Carr's Is Google Making USupid?

With the increased use of the Internet in people’s lives, a person cannot help but to feel a shift in the way he or she processes information so that the passages he or she reads are given cursory attention for the sake of efficiency. There are many consequences to this type of thinking. For instance, as Nicholas Carr, the writer of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” states, readers are more likely to put speed and practicality above forming connections within the text, which “may be weakening [their] capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace” (Carr 229). As unlikely as it seems, the way people read affects how they think. In the case of the Internet, the increase in information has shaped people to become shallow thinkers.
In his essay, Carr is critical and wary of the advances in technologies.
He states that while the Internet can be used to expedite research, it has the harmful effect of “scatter[ing] [people’s] attention and diffus[ing] [people’s] concentration” (230). This consequence goes beyond their interactions with a computer. It carries into their everyday life so that they think broadly but not deeply enough for meaningful connections; Carr descriptively calls these people “pancake people”(). One group that is most at risk is Americans, whom Carr’s essay primarily targets since the United States is the birthplace of the Internet. This is shown because he writes his essay for the Atlantic Monthly, an American publication known for its commentary on social issues. Furthermore, he references 2001: A Space Odyssey at the beginning to draw people into his essay. Since it is an American film, those in the United States are targeted since they are more likely to understand the point Carr makes about the perils of the Internet, which means they are encouraged to think about the effects of the way they interact with the
world. At the start of his essay, Carr uses anecdotes from various people to begin his argument. For instance, he quotes one pathologist who states that “[e]ven a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. [He] skim[s] it” (228). This is to demonstrate that the direction that modern society is heading toward is a growing concern since people’s attention spans shorten because of the breadth of information available. At the end of his essay, Carr concedes that he may just be a Luddite in suggesting that the emphasis on efficiency that Google promotes is mainly negative. He tells those who wish to hear his ideas to be skeptical of what he says since “[m]aybe [he is] just a worrywart” (233). Even so, with the increased knowledge present to people at any given moment, there may just be something lost to them: the ability to read and think beyond shallow snippets of information.