Reading Response #2

The article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr acknowledges the works of many scholars and intellectuals whose works believe that the Internet is changing the way our mind is working. Carr’s many examples emphasize this claim. For example he reiterates the story Friedrich Nietzsche of how he started to write with his eyes closed after purchasing a typewriter since they, his eyes, began to hurt. The story ends with a friend of Nietzsche informing him that his writing had a change in style, for the worse. Nietzsche then realizes the effect a medium of writing effects our writing, “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Carr argues the idea that the internet is starting to make our brain more systematic and robotic which will, he believes, decrease our ability for thought and speculation. A majority of Carr’s argument is supported by Frederick Winslow Taylor and how he improved the efficiency of Midvale Steel Plant’s machinists. Carr explains how Taylor took a stopwatch in the plant and measured the speed of everything and eventually developed a systematic way for each worker to work, this made the workers on happy, which raised the productivity rate. Just like Taylor’s system speed up the industrial manufacturing world, the internet is designed to be both efficient and automated collection, transmission and manipulation of information which requires to brain to worker in a quicker and rapider way.

One claim Carr makes is “media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.” Basically it’s saying that the media used to display material effect the way we think. This relates to his point because the internet is created for efficiency. Click link, click new link, click newer link, ect. The awesome part about the internet is you can so easily jump around from thing to thing and Carr believes that it is making our brain do the same thing. We no longer take the time to look deeper when we are online. We quickly except it and move on. This claim occurs fairly quickly in the article and is followed by examples. It fits with the rest of the article because he discusses the cause and effects of some technologies or the belief people had of those technologies coming out. For example, Plato disagreeing with writing because it would make people rely on written work rather than brain. Carr adds examples of bloggers to help argue his point about the mind jumping around. Bruce Friendman had discovered that his brain had taken a “staccato quality,” which has reflected to the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. Scott Karp, Carr explains, has also found it hard to read for long periods of time after using the web more and more. The claim is important to the way I view this article because it seems to make his argument more effective and less bias. Carr doesn’t exactly want to get the idea out that the internet is horrible and he kind of shows that by explaining how writing, tv, and other sources of media have also changed our minds. He also points out how there were always skeptics, like him, who were tentative about these mediums.