Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicolas Carr

 How is Google changing what we read, think, and who we are? In this paper, Nicholas Carr talks about how he thinks Google is making us stupid. Nicholas further talks about how every technology comes with a price. He expresses his views, perspectives, and conversations with his peers to back up his statement.

Immersing himself in long texts and books would come naturally has now become a struggle. He gets restless and loses focus in two to three pages. The deep reading that was natural is now something he has to force himself on. This problem or struggle is not just concentrated on him, but also on his peers, who are distressed because they are not able to consume literary works as they used to, and the internet has changed the way they think. Also, a faculty member from Michigan Medical School describes how he has lost the ability to read more than 3-4 paragraphs, even if it is a blog. He skims it. Nicholas concludes on the point, narrowing the reason to be the Internet, the research that would take days in libraries and stock rooms is now available in minutes that could be browsed in hyperlinks and quick clicks. The internet has become a universal medium, “can be an enormous boon to thinking” (Clive Thampson). But as everythings it comes with a price. Research from the University College London, a part of a five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behaviour of visitors from research sites, and they found that people using the sites exhibited a form of skimming activity, hopping from one site to another and rarely returning to any source they previously visited. They would read only 2-3 pages before bouncing off to another article or page.
Credit to the internet, the text has become popular, even through text-messaging. We may be reading more than we did in the 1970s to 1980s. “We are not only what we read, “we are how we read,” says Maryanne Wolfe, a developmental psychologist. The net promotes a reading style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all. This may also weaken our capacity for the deep kind of reading that the earlier technology, like the printing press, enabled.
Wolfe further explains that when reading online, we become “mere decoders of information.” This clips away our capacity to interpret text and form rich connections. Reading, explains Wolfe, is something that humans acquire and that is not inherited like speech. The medium of the channel that we use to practise the craft of reading plays an important role in forming neural circuits inside our brain, and this circuitry extends to different regions of the brain, including that which governs cognitive functions like memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. The circuits that are woven by a net and the circuits woven by a printed medium are different, and the same goes for the circuits woven by language with characters and those woven by alphabets.
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Nicholas further interprets how our writing changes, as with what we write, like in the 1820s, Friedrich Nietzsche brought a typewriter cause he had failing vision and focusing on pages became difficult, which forced him to curtail his writing. The typewriter excused him, at least for a time. Once he mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, and words could once again flow from his mind. But the effect the typewriter had on his work was subtle. His works were now tighter and telegraphic. Nietzsche explains that our writing equipments ake part in the forming of our thoughts. This could be seen in his works as well.
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The human brain is a very malleable and highly plastic organ, which enables us to form new connections and routinely break the old ones. The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.
Daniel Bell, a sociolohist has called our intellectual technologies: the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities, we inevitably begin to take on their qualities. An example he gave was a mechanical clock, how after the invention of the clock, we stopped listening to our biological clock and followed the mechanical one for our daily events, such as when we eat, sleep, etc.
The net has become our map, our clock, our printing press, our typewriter, our calculator, our telephone, our radio, and our TV.
When the net absorbs a medium, that medium is recreated in the Net’s image. When this happens, it injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, ads,s and other digital gewgaws.
Frederick Winslow Taylor developed a systematic approach by breaking down jobs into small, discrete steps and testing different methods for each one. He created precise instructions—an “algorithm”—dictating how workers should perform tasks. His “system” used time-and-motion studies to organise work, seeking maximum speed, efficiency, and output through tight industrial choreography.
This is what Google is doing to focus on speed and efficiency. The aim is to give you the perfect search engine that caters to what you want and gives you exactly that.
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Does Google Make Us Stupid is not a simple yes or no question; it's complex and multilayered. Like all inventions and technologies, this too has its advantages, and those advantages come with a price.