A Brief Look At Nick Carr

Where would the world stand without technology? Without a doubt, it would be a less advanced society. But, is the advancement of the technological world harming people in a subtle way? With the help of his sources, Nick Carr conveys a belief that intellectual technologies such as the internet are affecting people's minds in a subtly negative way. Although he states that he might just be worrisome, included in his article are examples from bloggers and research studies showing how people's minds progressively change. In addition to examples from bloggers and research, he brings in present day and historical anecdotes about how people's minds are always changing by the constantly changing intellectual technologies.. Through his writing style
This is shown in his four books, one named “Utopia is Creepy” and one of his articles published by the Washington, DC based magazine The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In his 2008 article, Carr starts off with an anecdote from the movie “A Space Odyssey”. The scene is one where HAL, the supercomputer malfunctions almost killing Dave, The astronaut. With this opening, Carr brings in the idea that minds are changing because of technology. Following this anecdote, he continues to describe how he believes that his own mind is changing. He talks about how he used to be able to read long texts with ease but recently he has had trouble following along. Carr is not the only one who feels that his mind is changing. Scott Karp, a blogger who wrote about online media. Karp stated that he used to be a voracious reader and then as he got more involved with the online world, the way he reads and processes written works has changed greatly(Carr 3). Carr mentioned Karp’s idea because of the similarities between both of their thoughts on the way their minds are
Carr states that the internet is becoming all encompassing, so much so that every time people do anything on the internet, it's tracked and the information they gather on internet users is used to feed them advertisements. In spite of his previous statements stating he believes minds are changing, he counters by expressing”Maybe I’m just a worrywart”(Carr 10). Subsequently, he says that there's a tendency to see the bad in technological advancement and brings in a historical anecdote timestamped at about 400B.C. in which Socrates sorrows over the advancement of writing, stating that writing down events will cause people to weaken their memory and forget important things. Carr communicates to his readers to be skeptical of his skepticism about how intellectual technologies are changing people's minds. He declares that people should make their own assumptions about whether these intellectual technologies are affecting the way people think and process