Is Google making us stupid?

Is Google making us stupid? That is the title and main object of debate in the essay that Nicholas Carr wrote. While not staying on one side of the fence and voicing his opinions Carr would prefer to sit on it and throw the pros and cons back and forth. Carr mentions early on in this essay that his mind is changing, the way he thinks is changing. He states that his concentration would drift when trying to read a lengthy piece of writing, that he would lose focus after only a few pages of what he used to read for hours. “I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” He later indicates that he is spending a lot of time online, the internet is a godsend to him as a writer, and that Google helps him find a quick fact or quote. The Internet is changing society itself, not just the way we read or find information, but how we are able to purchase things, contribute our thoughts, opinions, and feelings. He connects his activity on the internet to his change in reading. Later on in his essay Carr uses Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University. She claims that “We are not only what we read, we are how we read.” She also makes another statement that gave me a good shock and a look into how the mind works. As stated in his essay “Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand.” So, in other words, reading and writing is something that can change easily and frequently. While Google may not be making us stupid it is making us efficient in finding facts that we need quickly.