Mahuru 1

Ritini Mahuru
Writing 1010
Rogers
2-18-15
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
In the article, the author talks about how the web changes the way people thinks and
takes information in their brain. The web has made humans become lazier; people arent able to
focus on their work and they will try to find something else to do. The author has explained
about how the web has not only made people lazy, but also become stupid; stupid because people
are finding only the answers to a question without any understanding of why it is the answer.
There were many good examples that was shown in this article that showed Pathos, Ethos, and
Logos.
The first and second paragraph in the authors article; he uses pathos. The author first
describes a scene from a movie; Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey; where Dave
Bowman an astronaut starts disconnecting the memory circuits that controls the artificial brain of
a supercomputer name HAL. While Bowman is disconnecting the circuits from the computer,
HAL keeps pleading Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. Than the author
talks about how he relates the scene to the web. He said that he can relate to the computer,
because he can feel it; the way his mind is working is changing. He brings in Im not thinking
the way I used to think. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.
I get fidgety begin looking for something else to do. How he uses pathos is that he feels
like he cant focus on reading after two pages, so he finds something else to do. The deep

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reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. What I got from this is that the author
thinks that because of the web, he can no longer focus on working productively anymore like he
used too. After reading a few paragraphs, he was no longer interested. The way that the web has
changed the way his mind thinks is very interesting; because I find it true; I myself also cannot
focus on a long paper; like this article. This is pathos because the author expressed how the web
changed the way he focuses on working. Another example that shows pathos was in the last part
of the article where he continues from the scene of the movie. The author said that he was
haunted by the scene when the computer kept pleading in despair and kept repeating I can feel
it. I can feel it. Im afraid so much feelings from the computer poured out as the emotionless
human disconnects the circuits. The author says that from the movie, all of the humans were
more like emotionless robots than the computer, who was more like a human. As we come to
rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that
flattens into artificial intelligence. This is pathos because he expressed his feelings about how
the scene disturbed him because he realized that the humans in the movie were actually
machinelike than the computer.
For ethos, the author has talked about bloggers that he follows who are experiencing the
same things he is. A blogger; Scott Karp, confessed that he has stopped reading books. what
if I do all my reading on the web not so much because of the way I read has changed, Im just
seeking convenience, but because the way I think has changed? The blogger said that he
stopped reading books because he can no longer read deeply into it; instead he reads on the
internet to seek answers. And because of that, he thinks that he has started to think differently.
This is ethos because he has used bloggers in his article to show that the bloggers have the same
experience he is having. Another example of ethos is Googles headquarters; the chief executive

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said a company thats founded around the science of measurement systematize everything it
does. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. The
author explains how people who leaves trails of what they search for helps google to advertise
better based on peoples searches, thus giving google more popularity and wealth because they
are changing the minds of people by distracting them. This is ethos because the author credited
google for being responsible of changing the way peoples minds work.
And last for logos the author has introduced the study from University College London,
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that
new forms of reading are emerging as users power browse horizontally through titles,
contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid
reading in the traditional sense. The studies shown in the article proves that people are only
searching through websites for answers at the shortest times on the page. The way reading has
changed is dramatic, people no longer stays to read the whole entire page because there is no
easy way to find it; and it is no longer interesting. This is logos because this is a study that
proves that people no longer reads anything on the web like in a traditional sense. Another
example of logos from Maryanne Wolf Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms
develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of
us 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. This is logos because proof from these experiments
are that she explains why human circuits from the use of the web will be different from circuits
of reading books and other printed materials.

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In the article the author has brought in many good examples to prove his point that the
web has changed the way peoples minds work. For pathos, he expressed how he felt that the
way he thinks is different when he reads on the web; he felt more distracted when trying to focus
on the web than he did when reading a book. For ethos, he showed bloggers thoughts about the
same experiences of how they started to read differently by not being able to focus on the web,
and how they cannot be able to read more deeply. And for logos he showed evidence of studies
that showed that people searched on many pages to find and read pages from different sites for
only a short time. To answer the question; is google making us stupid? I think the author would
say no, I think the way that reading has changed between reading a book and reading from the
web is very different. People are able to grasp more deeply into a book because its just one
source that you can only find information about it. As for the web, there are multiple sites to
search for information, which people can easily become distracted.