Reading Response 2:

In Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid? I believe that his central claim is how the internet is affecting how people write and how it affects our intelligence. In this essay I think he Carr is trying to make people realize how the internet as he puts it is, “tinkering” with our brains. He emphasizes in his writing how reading use to be so much different for him, for example he believes 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 also says that his “concentration starts to drift after two or three pages” Carr suggests this is for the reason that the internet is taking away from peoples concentration and thought process. A study was done by scholars from University College of London in a five year research program, they suggest that “we may well be in the mist of a sea change in the way we read and think.” These scholars looked over computer logs and observed the behavior of two websites. The first website was operated by the British library and the other by the U.K educational consortium. In this study they established that people using the websites exhibited “a form of skimming activity” they also observed that “they would read no more then one of two pages of an article and ‘bounce’ to another site.” The study reporters claimed that “new forms of reading are emerging” through something as simple as browsing the internet. In Carr’s article he is trying to get through to his readers and make them realize that the internet is changing the way of reading and writing.
One of Carr’s claims in his article that I feel is important is, “The internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies.” In other words the internet another brain for us, it’s able to do so much you can find out virtually anything without having to read through a book or even a paragraph, endless information is at our fingertips. Carr later reminds us “It’s becoming our clock, our print press, and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.” This claim is important for getting Carr’s point across because the broad idea of the whole article is technology and how it’s affecting our reading, so it’s significant to emphasize how technology is becoming something that can do so many things for us.
In my experience reading a article or blog post online for me can be more difficult then reading an actual book because I feel that I am much more sidetracked with all the other things that I could be looking up or finding out on the internet. When I am reading through a reading I easily find myself, as Carr recognized “dragging my wayward brain back to the text.” I found this article intriguing because I never deeply thought how something as simple as the internet would change the way we read.