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
reading experience, and no longer read longer texts in great depth.
The Internet enables people to further their own thoughts. However, by providing easy access to a pre-selected, and edited, version of information, we are easily manipulated to shape our thoughts into a specific mold. This causes us to discard our innovative ideas, and accept the Internet’s information, without further contemplation. Many literary professionals are having similar experiences. For example, blogger about online media, Scott Karp, speculates that the change from being an avid book reader, to someone who merely skims over texts, is due to the change in our thinking process and continual quest for convenience. This speculation can be reinforced with actual research. Study of Online Research Habits, which was published by scholars from University College London, concludes that people using the Internet, only skim over a resource before going to the next website.
The increasing use of technology allows us to read more than we did a couple of decades ago. Reading from a technological source, like a cellphone, as opposed to a book, is a different form of reading, and therefore, requires a different form of thinking. Maryanne Wolf explains this in her book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. She points out that our thinking process is not only influenced by what we read, but also by the manner in which we read. Wolf explains that we have to teach our brains to translate different characters into words we recognize and thus, it is not a process that occurs naturally to humans. The type of work that we read has different effects on shaping the neutral circuits in our brains. For example, a playwright, Friedrich Nietzsche made use of a typewriter instead of a pen and paper, and his friend noticed that his already terse prose had become even more ridged. From this, we can assume that our equipment might influence our thought process.
Researchers have discovered that the human brain does not stop evolving over time. This development occurs because the nerve cells are continuously adapting, for intellectual advancement. The human brain has the ability to reprogram itself, thus it is vulnerable to external influences, such as technology. Our brain stops obeying old processes of thinking, and allows technology to influence our current thinking processes. This can be seen in relation to a mechanical clock. After they were incorporated into our everyday lives, humans adopted this as the norm, and we discarded our natural senses. A more modern example is the digital computer that has taken over the role of the mechanical clock, as well as most other intellectual technologies. Due to having the ability to interchange between numerous roles, the computer has complete control over our attention span, and what we see online.
The Internet is able to maintain the audiences’ attention by adapting to heightened expectations.
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
requirements.
The Internet suggests that the human brain should adapt to work as high-speed data-processing machines.
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
experiences.
Carr suggests that we need to consider both sides when deciding whether the Internet plays a beneficial, or detrimental part in our lives. The Internet may provide easier access to resources, but learning requires deep reading, which is not always possible to do online. Deep reading allows a person to create analogies, which is important for developing culture. In an essay, by Richard Foreman, he concludes that people are no longer unique due to religion and education, but rather forced to develop under the information overload that we all bear. Instead of inheriting dense culture, we are becoming thinly spread-out over the networks that we have access to. In the film, 2001, people have become machinelike, which highlights the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy, which explains that our own intelligence disappears into artificial intelligence, because we fully rely on computers to explain our understanding of the world around us.