Summary Final

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 tells us that the books that once caused him to imagine and think no longer drew the appeal they once did. What Carr feels has changed his way of thinking is none other then the internet. As a writer, he uses the internet to conduct much of his research in what Carr terms a “godsend”. He describes his reading “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Concerned with inability to stay focused on his reading he confers with his colleges only to find that they to have been struggling with the same thoughts. Carr refers to “study of online research habits” a 5 year study conducted by University College London, which “suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.” This fact seems to comfort Carr. We are still reading just in a different way. Thanks to the internet and the use of text messaging, 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 Google. 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. However, our quests 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.