Reading Response: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
I have always taken the convenience of Google as a privilege and never thought of the implications it has on humans. With the evolution of the internet, especially now moving onto smartphones, we want information in the shortest form and the quickest way.
Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making us Stupid?” explores an issue me and so many of my peers can relate to: how has the internet impacted our brains ability to read thoroughly and actually process what we are reading. With a simple search in a search bar we can instantly get whatever we are looking for and more.
Reading Carr’s article, he mentioned habits he has seen change in himself that I can relate to. For instance, when reading Carr’s article to analyze, I could not read the entirety of it all at once. I scanned through paragraphs looking for the points I saw as important and could only go through about three paragraphs at a time. One of his sources, Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University, says, “reading is not an instinctive skill for human beings, it’s not etched into our genes the way speech is.” I see this as an important point because if new generations aren’t acquiring that skill, it is scary to think how people will read and process information in the future.
Google’s goal is to ultimately make a search engine that will know exactly what someone wants to see. If they succeed, it will be as smart or smarter as humans. I see this as highly concerning because if people are only getting lazier in getting their information it allows computers to outsmart us. We no longer take the time to fully engage in what we are reading because it is on the internet or in our phones if we need it later.
As Carr points out, already the media has had to find ways to cater to society’s new demands for processing information. Traditional newspapers, for example, have suffered as a result and have had to surrender to the new media solution of news outlets having apps and online websites highlighting the top news for readers to see quickly.
While the future can’t be foreseen, Carr leaves readers with grim last words, “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” I personally think we need to be more diligent in relying less on computers to gain our knowledge and more on books and talking to other people to get information. In my opinion, it is not Google itself that is making us stupid, but the laziness we are acquiring through convenience search engines offer us.
