Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Nicholas Carr says that he is not thinking the way he used to think. He says that he notices it the most when he reads; that immersing himself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy, and that’s rarely the case anymore. He says his concentration often drifts away from what he’s reading, gets fidgety and starts looking for something else to do and that he has to force his brain back on the text. He also says that the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. Carr Nicollas noticed that for over a decade now he spends a lot of time online, searching and surfing. He says the Web has been a godsend to him as a writer.Carr believes the Net is lessening his capacity for concentration and contemplation, that his mind simply just takes in the information the way the Net has it. He says that once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. He notices similar experiences with his friends and acquaintances. Most believe the more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some think this phenomenon has occurred because since reading online has become more convenient, the way people read has not changed but maybe the way they think has changed.

A recently published study of online research concluded that it is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of reading are emerging as users power browse horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense. Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist believes we may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology. That when we read online, we tend to become mere decoders of information. Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. A British mathematician Alan Turing believes that the Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV. Carr says that the kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. Carr believes ultimately that as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

I agree with nicholas Carr, because internet makes everything easy and that' s why we get to forget about what we learned easily. Internet makes people not reading books anymore because they feel like it' s taking forever, and also boring. People can' t stand reading books anymore, because internet has the summary almost for every book. I also agree that info on the Web may lead to the lack of a persons ability to make mental connections to text and think deeply about what they are reading. With access to all kinds of sources online it is easy to find an article etc, skim it, form a understanding of it, then move on to the next article and do the same, only to forget it later because its so easy to obtain that there is no mental connections being made to the text. But Internet is a new technology, i think it' s the same as a book, it' s just shorter maybe or quiker to find a new information. I think everybody believes in new technology.