Looking back: has Google made us stupid?
In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an article for The Atlantic arguing that the Internet’s dominating presence in our lives has caused humankind to consume information at a faster pace, but at a shallower level. The piece and its subject matter recieved much media attention in the months following its publication, to the point where it has its own Wikipedia page.
Much of the piece’s persuasive power comes from Carr’s writing style, which employs colourful descriptive words like “telltale,” “pithy,” and “etched,” as well as anecdotes of individuals who should, by Carr’s standards, have a better understanding of literature than most. However, the most interesting of Carr’s writing techniques is his opening analogy, which serves as an overarching symbol of the internet’s effects on our brains, as well as a hook to draw readers in.
Carr’s opening paragraph describes a famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: the deactivation of the supercomputer HAL.
Drawing on popular culture, Carr’s ultimate goal with this analogy is to link HAL’s “mind loss” to the change he feels his brain is going through. In order to do this, he must first establish audience sympathy with HAL, and does so by describing the computer and the astronaunt, Dave Bowman, in two very different ways.
The paragraph uses the words “pleads” and “forlornly” to describe HAL’s actions to paint the machine as helpless and pitiful. More significantly, it describes Bowman as “implacable,” “calm,” and “cold.” By portraying Bowman as the antagonist, Carr effectively sways reader emotion to sympathy for HAL.
Carr’s then tries to link this emotion to his experience. This is where the analogy begins to fall apart, however. While using such a memorable scene from a movie is a great hook to draw readers into the article, the transition from HAL’s silicon mind to Carr’s organic one is jarring. At first glance, the connection makes sense, but when reread and thought on, Carr’s situation is much different from HAL’s. HAL feels “it” as the removal of its memory banks, Carr feels something, but definitely not the physical removal of his brain. In fact, Carr can’t quite place his finger on what’s happening, and instead further distances himself from HAL by changing his argument in the third line of his second paragraph:
“My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but it’s changing.”
At this point, Carr has given up on his analogy, switching the state of his mind from “going” to “changing.”
Carr’s analogy is a great hook that, no doubt, drew many readers in. But the analogy drawn between his mind and HAL’s artificial consciousness doesn’t quite hold under critical analysis. There is one saving grace, however. At the end of the essay, Carr performs a mini-film analysis, explaining how humans in 2001, steeped in technology, have become more machine-like than the actual machines. This final sentence is extremely effective in sumarizing the point of his 4000+ word essay, and reverberates in the readers’ minds long after the piece has been read.
