Is Google Making Us Stupid?: Essay 3 Summary

In "Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet is doing to our brains," Nicholas Carr illustrates how technology may be reshaping how we as a society are learning, collecting and interpreting information. He compares our modern day internet with the artificial inelegance from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, able to retrieve vast quantities of information with a single request, but at what cost. Carr finds that the books that once caused him to image and think no longer draw the appeal they once did yet at the same time, the information and research available to him through the internet seems to be limitless. He confers with his colleges only to find that they to have been struggling with the same thoughts. What seems to comfort him is the fact that we, as a society, are still learning, reading, just in a different way. Long gone is the need for big bulky typewriters and books, replaced by small cell phones and a huge library of information at your fingertips on the internet. He tells us how, like Frederick Winslow Taylor in the industrial world, our thinking and processing of our writing seems to be becoming almost mechanical. But our quest for advancement moves us forward much like the team at Google who is striving to create real artificial inelegance. Carr is concerned, is this technology, this desire to create artificial intelligence causing us to lose our intelligence.