Nicholas Carr's Essay 'Is Google Making USupid?'

Nicholas Carr discusses the negative effects of technology in his essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” First, he points out how constant technology use causes the mind to change. In discussing his mind, Carr states how it’s “changing. [He’s] not thinking the way [he] used to think” (315). In other words, Carr believes that the prolonged hours spent on the Internet correlates with his loss of concentration after reading a few pages of an article or a novel. Moreover, Carr explicates how the mind’s adaptation to operate just like the Internet is due to the immediate access of information. He further describes the plasticity of the brain by elucidating that “nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones” (319). Carr’s point is that since the brain spends more time focused on a computer, the neurons adapt to function like a computer’s inner mechanisms. However, Carr mentions that this increased time on the Internet causes the brain to become more mechanical. He explains that “our ability to interpret text” while on the Internet “remains largely disengaged” (Carr 317). In making this comment, Carr reveals how the Internet does not allow people to read and analyze information freely, in terms of how we think. The author is saying that reading on the Internet has caused him to only understand the direct purpose of the …show more content…
As a child, I had access to dial-up Internet. Because dial-up Internet cannot work at the same time as the phone, I spent my days playing Pinball on the desktop computer. During elementary school, I completed my projects by going to the library to research. But as the years passed and I went to middle school, I went to the library less and used online databases more. By the time I finished high school, researching at the library was nonexistent as I accomplished all of it on the Internet. My experiences show how the Internet became a haven of