Google

Is Google making us stupid? That's what Nicholas Carr discusses in his essay "Is Google Making us Stupid". He doesn't just mean google in particular though it's more that he used Google because Google is the face of the internet. He say's that the web has been a godsend to him as a writer because he can just reach out and pluck whatever information he is looking for and go about his business . But by power browsing like that no one really get's any real information. They get bits of it but If I were working on, say a puzzle of an eagle and all I had were two pieces, one of a portion of it's beak and one of a portion of it's tail I still wouldn't have the whole picture. Sure I could speculate on what I think the puzzle is going to be once I find the other pieces but it could be something completely different. Carr also states that ever since the internet he has changed the way he absorbs information. Things that used to be easy like reading a book, or a long article have now become hard to stay focused on. He says, " Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come so naturally has become a struggle." . So now we go back to my puzzle analogy. According to Carr the puzzle would never be finished, I would get bored and go off and make a sandwich come back and be like "Oh! I forgot!" start working on the puzzle again and then not be able to focus once again. The big picture or the "Wisdom" of the puzzle will never actually be absorbed until I could sit down and deep read that puzzle. So is Google making us stupid? Probably. Is Carr over reacting to Google making us stupid? Who knows. Does his article bring up a lot of interesting points about the way we absorb information, read, and go about our lives? Yes. Am I writing this last sentence because I can't focus on a task for a long period of time thus making it almost impossible to have a proper ending? Yes.