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Nathanael DuMont
ENG 101
Professor Bolton
7 March 2012
Technology: For the Good and the Bad of Mankind
Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” argues that the Internet is causing the human
mind to be less complex than it used to be. He believes that the internet has altered the way people
think and read. Carr points out that, more so now than ever, people have a problem reading a long
article and, instead, have developed the habit to skim. The internet has become a “universal medium”
for Carr, but he states that it is “chipping away *his+ capacity for concentration and contemplation”
(962). He also points out that people are lazier in finding information these days and have it easier than
people a hundred years ago. In his opinion, people have ceased to exercise their memory. Information
is expected immediately at the touch of a button nowadays. Google is constantly updating their
software to provide their users with the information they are searching for, making it less challenging for
that person. I believe that Carr’s argument is right, but to an extent. I don’t believe that using the
Internet is causing people to be less smart, but I do believe it presently has an effect on how people are
taking in the information compared to back when the Internet was not used.
It is true that people these days aren’t reading as in depth as they have done in the past. It has
been proven, through five years of research from the University College of London, that “people using
the [online] sites exhibited a form of skimming activity, hopping from one source to another and rarely
returning to any source they’d already visited” (963). On top of that, they only read one or two pages of
the article before jumping to the next site. More often than not, I also find myself doing this type of
behavior. I get uninterested in the article or document I am reading and decide to flip to something else

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that could potentially be more amusing. This confirms Carr’s statement that people have a greater
tendency to skim over documents, rather than actually reading them.
Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University, explains on how we have to
“teach our minds to how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand”
(964). Carr goes on to say,
Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental
circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of use whose written
language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain,
including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation
of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the
Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works. (964)
The “shaping of neural circuits in our brains” depends on which device or method of reading we partake
in.
Carr believes that humans have not been working their brains out due to the fact that they use
the internet to solve many of the problems that they have. Instead of searching for it, and spending
days at a time trying to find the answer, people can type it in and receive it within seconds. He discusses
Socrates, who was against the development of writing. Socrates believed that “as people came to rely
on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their head, they would
cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful” (970). Socrates was right, but only to a certain
degree. He thought people would be more ignorant and full of false wisdom, which is certainly
sometimes true. Take presidential speeches for one. The president is shown what to say on a
teleprompter so that he has less of a chance of messing up and looking like a complete fool on national
television. The president could be an extremely idiotic person, but as long as he knows how to read, he
can seem like the smartest person in the world.

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According to Carr, reading and writing “serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and
expand human knowledge” (970). The internet helps in expanding this idea even further. People all
around the world can share their ideas and beliefs to other people that are thousands of miles away.
Finding documents and reading them through an internet search base, such as Google, may help the
person have less trouble in finding the information they need, but it also helps in expanding their
knowledge much faster than searching days for the answer. This shows that the internet is partially a
good thing that the human race has acquired.
Nicholas Carr is correct when he says that reading documents from the Internet has caused
people to adapt the way they read compared to when they read hardcopy material. However, their
reading method does not mean that they are not absorbing the material that they are reading. The
Internet has only warped the way they take in the information. Due to the massive amount of material
available to each and every person, instead of paying attention to smaller details, people are taking in
the gist of all the material they are reading. In doing so, they learn much more than people who did not
have this opportunity in the past.

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Works Cited
Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Norton Field Guide to Writing With Readings and
Handbook. 2nd ed. Eds. Richard Bullock, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Francine Weinberg. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 961-972. Print.