Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr speaks of how technology is changing the way we think. Carr explains how he is not thinking the same way as he used to. Reading a book has become a struggle for him, his brain begins to drift. Carr blames the internet and its instantaneous results for information. The internet is a universal tool to discover all sorts of information in a matter of minutes. Carr used the media theorist Marshall McLuhan who stated in the 1960s, media is not just passive channels of information. Carr continues, “The media supplies the stuff of thought, but it also shapes the process of thought. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.” By using the internet to gain information, our mind begins to act as the technology does. Our mind is trained to seek out information as fast and efficient as the internet delivers it. Carr speaks of how we may be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when only television was the technology of choice. This excessive reading comes from the various text messaging through cell phones, and the text on the internet. Carr used Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, as an example who stated “We are not only what we read. We are how we read.” The information we gain from reading not only enhances our knowledge, but transforms the way we gain that knowledge. Wolf worries that reading on the internet promotes a different style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else. Because of this, we are losing our ability to engage in a book. We seek the immediate satisfaction that we gain from using the internet. Carr studied sociologist Daniel Bell. Daniel Bell suggests we use “intellectual technologies,” where we soon begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. Carr finds Lewis Mumford, a historian and cultural critic, who uses the mechanical clock as an example. Mumford explains how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The clock transformed the way we thought, the way we lived our every day lives. Our actions revolved around the timing of the clock. Carr used Joseph Weizenbaum to explain how our reality began to change because of the mechanical clock. Weizenbaum stated that the ideals of the world that emerged from the use of timekeeping gadgets “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.”Our reality was being controlled by the mechanical clock. We ignored our natural human instincts and based our actions off the timing of the clock. Since technology is so immersed in our lives, this method of manipulation could be used to change the way our society works as a whole. Carr explains a man by the name of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who began a series of experiments aimed at improving efficiency in the factory world. He used a group of factory workers and broke down their jobs into a sequence of small steps. Taylor established a precise set of instructions for the workers to follow that allowed them to be the most efficient. Taylor’s industrial ideals were practiced by manufacturers across the country. In his book “1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management”, Taylor stated his goal was to identify and adopt the “one best method” of work for every job to ensure the most efficient method possible. This ideal would not only reconstruct the manufacturing industry, but society as a whole. The internet is an extended tool based off this efficient method. The internet is designed for the instantaneous and vast collection of knowledge. This ideal is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well, transforming how we think. Carr worries that as we come to rely so heavily on the various technologies in our lives, our own intelligence begins to flatten transforming into the intelligence of the technology itself.