An Analysis of Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid”
In the last 30 years, a wave of technological innovation has swept over the Earth, blanketing our cultures with Cell Phones, Microwaves, and the peculiar creation labeled simply, “The Internet”. Emerging to the public in the 1990’s, the Internet is a vast collection of databases stored all around the world, allowing anyone with a computer and access to the internet to view virtually anything you might want to learn about. However, even in its early age, the Internet displayed curious properties, as popular tech-cartoonist Scott Adams states,” In 1993, there were only a handful of Web sites you could access, such as the Smithsonian’s exhibit of gems. These pages were slow to load and crashed …show more content…
Failing to address these benefits to the internet would open Carr immediately to criticism from other writers, such as Clive Thompson, a writer mentioned early in Carr’s text who wrote his own book detailing the benefits of the internet. While Carr does provide many good examples of Prolepsis, this is not to say that Carr creates an absolute defense, as even in the quote above, he fails to mention other aspects of the internet’s effects such as the internet’s effect on writing, something Thompson goes into great detail over, leaving a weakness open in his argument. Additionally, Carr could use more evidence for some of his uses of Prolepsis, as even in his section rebutting a very short section from Thompson, “Thompson has written,”[The Internet] can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price”(Carr, 2), he relies on a personal view, rather than evidence. However, despite the deficiencies of parts of his defense, Prolepsis is key to Carr’s main argument, in that if he cannot defend the weak parts of his article and at the same time force his audience to face the possibility of side effects in the commonly believed “benefits” of the internet. His whole argument will fall apart under the scrutiny of a group that most likely does not want to find something as key to their lives as the Internet, as a possible source of
In the last 30 years, a wave of technological innovation has swept over the Earth, blanketing our cultures with Cell Phones, Microwaves, and the peculiar creation labeled simply, “The Internet”. Emerging to the public in the 1990’s, the Internet is a vast collection of databases stored all around the world, allowing anyone with a computer and access to the internet to view virtually anything you might want to learn about. However, even in its early age, the Internet displayed curious properties, as popular tech-cartoonist Scott Adams states,” In 1993, there were only a handful of Web sites you could access, such as the Smithsonian’s exhibit of gems. These pages were slow to load and crashed …show more content…
Failing to address these benefits to the internet would open Carr immediately to criticism from other writers, such as Clive Thompson, a writer mentioned early in Carr’s text who wrote his own book detailing the benefits of the internet. While Carr does provide many good examples of Prolepsis, this is not to say that Carr creates an absolute defense, as even in the quote above, he fails to mention other aspects of the internet’s effects such as the internet’s effect on writing, something Thompson goes into great detail over, leaving a weakness open in his argument. Additionally, Carr could use more evidence for some of his uses of Prolepsis, as even in his section rebutting a very short section from Thompson, “Thompson has written,”[The Internet] can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price”(Carr, 2), he relies on a personal view, rather than evidence. However, despite the deficiencies of parts of his defense, Prolepsis is key to Carr’s main argument, in that if he cannot defend the weak parts of his article and at the same time force his audience to face the possibility of side effects in the commonly believed “benefits” of the internet. His whole argument will fall apart under the scrutiny of a group that most likely does not want to find something as key to their lives as the Internet, as a possible source of