Analysis Of Is Google Making USupid, By Nicholas Carr

Through the short story, Is Google Making Us Stupid, the author, Nicholas Carr suggests that the Internet affects how human beings process literary works. He begins to illustrate this point by using a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey where the man purposely disassembles HAL, the supercomputer, in order to disconnect its ability to think for itself. Carr personifies HAL, and describes how it could feel its brain being taken away as the man stripped it of its memory circuits. Carr compares the sensation that the supercomputer endures, when losing its mind, to how the Internet has rewired our human brains. It has made low-concentration levels a norm, and thus, has caused a change in our reading styles: we now immerse in a shallow
It is made more appealing by introducing shortcuts. These shortcuts enable people to grasp a short summary of the article, without wasting time by reading the entire text. The advancement of the Internet is comparable to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s model, which broke down jobs into smaller steps to maximize efficiency. Taylor’s ethic is prominent on the Internet, and tries to establish the single most efficient method to carry out “knowledge work”. Taylor’s concept of breaking down tasks is exactly what Google is doing by systemizing everything for the intellectual mind. This goal is evident in Google’s attempt to make vast quantities of information, accessible at a quicker rate, in order to increase the productivity. Google aims to turn their general search engine into an artificial intelligence, which is comparable to HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. They hope to do this, because they believe that if a person has all the world’s information attached to his or her brain, the person would have the capacity to be more productive. The idea of being replaced by artificial intelligence is unsettling, because the human brain is so imperfect, yet a computer can be adapted to meet these
Google and other companies collect their information from what we surf on the Internet, so that they can advertise things that appeal to us. Therefore, the faster we process the data, the more information they gain for their own use. Their aim is to distract the reader; so that they can gain from whatever information we leave behind for them to use, to advance their own interests. The Internet is comparable to Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates shortsightedly worries that the development of writing would restrict people’s ability to think for themselves, and therefore, they would lose their wisdom. In a way, the Internet prevents us from coming up with our own, innovated ideas, but in the long run, it provides a platform where people are able to acquire knowledge based on past research and