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Is Google Making Us Stupid

Nicholas Carr discusses how the internet is affecting our ability to concentrate and engage in deep reading, suggesting that our cognitive processes are being altered by our online habits. He shares personal experiences and references a study indicating that users exhibit skimming behaviors rather than traditional reading, often bouncing between sources without fully engaging. This shift raises concerns about the long-term impact of internet use on our thinking and reading capabilities.

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Jenny Chavush
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298 views4 pages

Is Google Making Us Stupid

Nicholas Carr discusses how the internet is affecting our ability to concentrate and engage in deep reading, suggesting that our cognitive processes are being altered by our online habits. He shares personal experiences and references a study indicating that users exhibit skimming behaviors rather than traditional reading, often bouncing between sources without fully engaging. This shift raises concerns about the long-term impact of internet use on our thinking and reading capabilities.

Uploaded by

Jenny Chavush
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Is Google Making Us Stupid?

By Nicholas Carr
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer
HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly
poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning
machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its
artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel
it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that
someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural
circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—
but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most
strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used
to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the
argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s
rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two
or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to
do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep
reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending
a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the
great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a
writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms
of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some
quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was
after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s
info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts,
watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to
link.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium. The advantages
of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are
many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of
silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous
boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist
Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of
information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of
thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for
concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the
way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba
diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. Some of the writers I follow have also begun mentioning the
phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently
confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in
college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He
speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much
because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because
the way I THINK has changed?”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and
psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use
affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits ,
conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well
be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-
year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the
behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library
and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-
books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the
sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to
another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They
typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would
“bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s
no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study
report:

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.

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