Nicholas Carr Is Google Making USupid Summary

Human Intelligence in the Internet Era
Nowadays, if a young adult hears a new terminology, instead of going to a library and looking it up in an encyclopedia as what his or her parents would have done, he or she will pull out his or her smartphone and “google” it. Thanks to Google and all other commercial Internet companies, we are closer to all kinds of information, both useful and useless, than any other time in human history. In Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he admits how the immediate access to the rich store of online information is benefiting him largely as a writer (Carr, 589). While enjoying this positive influence of the Net, however, he brings up a side effect of the Internet which is hardly ever mentioned:
We cannot deny that to read in a traditional way is reading in a more concentrated and slower pace which could provide us more space to think deeply, even from our own experience. As what Carr writes in the article that Taylorism has turned the factory workers into little more than automatons (Carr, 593), the Internet is now turning us into a kind of automatons, “information robots”, as well. From day to day as we surf the Internet, we actually read a lot and are able to obtain all sorts of information. Nevertheless, out of their own business interests, the commercial Internet companies try to push us to click as many links as we can and view as many pages as we can during the time we spend on the Internet, instead of encouraging “leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought” (Carr, 595). As a result, after years, although more and more people are able to enjoy the convenient and affordable Internet connection, those commercial Internet companies have successfully trained more and more people to follow their rules and become their means of making profit unconsciously. Following their rules, we are used to flick through all the materials and gradually lose our ability to read concentratedly. However, as the ones who possess human intelligence, we need
We become its followers, following its belief in “isolated, measured, and optimized” intelligence and its depiction of the future of artificial intelligence. The Internet is training us to think in a way without “the fuzziness of contemplation” (Carr, 595), the same way how artificial intelligence works. As a result, we gradually forget the uniqueness of our own intelligence: the beauty of the ambiguity. However, do we really expect everything to be certain and fixed? As the saying goes, “there are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people's eyes.” We never try to figure out a standard way to interpret Hamlet, because it is not a “True or False” question. Everyone is expected to have a different interpretation based on his or her own personal experience and since people interpret it in different ways, Hamlet is no longer a lifeless figure life on book pages, he becomes a concrete figure lives in every reader’s imagination. It is the ambiguity that makes reading a pleased and fascinating process for us. Besides reading, there are thousands of questions in our life are free response questions which are filled with ambiguity and leaves us a space for interpretation. When we interpret those ambiguities from different emotional approaches, we see their various meanings. It is such ambiguity and variousness that shape our