Is Google Making Us Stupid? Persuasive Essay
Is Google really making us stupid? Nicholas Carr, The writer makes several suggestions about the internet is changing the way our mind works and that it has negative consequences on the mind. Mr. Nicolas Carr believes that we should be skeptical of the internet because of the adverse ways it may be shaping the way we think. Thinking critically about his article, I can find some patterns in his writing, such as fact and fiction, presenting evidence with an argument, cause and effect, and tonal qualities. Mr. Carr discusses that he feels like his mind is being influenced by advancing technologies.
He states that even as a writer his mind struggles to keep focused on a book, something that is new to him. He blames this on the internet, which he describes as “The perfect recall of silicone memory”. The writer uses his friends as examples, stating that “… many are having similar experiences”. While impossible to tell if this fiction or not, one can reason that he’s most likely stating fact. Mr. Carr does bring up facts from a London study where results suggest that internet readers aren’t reading in traditional methods and that they do not absorb the text that they are reading.
The writer then brings up a conversation that he had, stating an interesting fact of how reading is not part of our genes like how speech is. That is a very interesting fact and that suggests that the way we read can be influenced just like other habits. He brings in quotes from other professors he has talked to and mentions how the human brain can still be molded even at older ages. To help support his discussion, he brings up a very interesting part of history. With the invention of the mechanical clock, people minds were changed into thinking in mathematical sections of time.
That people “…eat, work, sleep, rise, we stopped listing to our senses and started obeying the clock”. In the arguments put forward by Nicolas Carr’s article, some interesting ideas and evidence surface. I would say that the main point of this essay is to stir discussion how the internet may have negative effects on the human mind. Mr. Carr states how his own memory is being affected by speeding on the internet jumping from one page to the next. He further supports that his reading habits that used to be natural for him have become struggles. He argues that the zip lining across the internet is changing how we read and how we interpret text.
He backs this up from evidence from studies performed in London that suggests that people exhibit “”a form of skimming activity” and “…read no more than one or two pages of an article or a book before they would bounce out to another site”. Another point he tries to argue is that technology is taking part of forming in his thoughts. He proposes that it has “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style”. The pattern of cause and effect is also apparent in his writing, starting from the very beginning.
