English 101
8 October
Is Google Making Us Stupid Summary
Is Google making us stupid? The author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr, points out that the internet has somewhat become our main source of gaining information. What used to be hours of reading books and other long pieces of literature has now turned into a struggle of reading just a couple pages. Research that used to take days spent in the library can now be done in a matter of minutes with just few simple clicks. Even though it's more convenient and efficient, there’s still a loss of that experience when you dive into a deep read. Carr first states how he seems to not be able to focus on reading. The same situation has also happened to a few friends of Carr, who he says most are literary types. The constant use of the web makes it that much harder to focus on lengthy pieces. Carr talks about Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist, who pointed out that the media shapes the process of thought. He also mentions that the scholars of the University College London have done a study of online research habits by examining two popular research sites. They’ve come to learn that people have formed a habit of skimming through information on the sites, jumping from site to site. They only seem to read a few pages of an article and then go to the next site. Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist and author, worries that the internet may have decreased our capacity for deep reading. She states that people tend become “mere decoders of information” when reading online. Reading is not a skill that’s already implanted into people like speech is. The mind has to teach itself how to decipher characters used in the language we speak and understand. So reading online will be very different on the mind than reading books or other printed literature. In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter due to his vision failing. Once he mastered using the typewriter, he could type easily with his closed....