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Is Google Making us Stupid?
Abstract
What is the Internet doing to our brains while surfing through the websites and searching for some hyperlinks, reading and writing emails? How could this affect our abilities on reading, and writing? In the article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? (July/August 2008) by Nicholas Carr, shows that the internet is changing people’s mindsets all the time. The article highlights important points in the difference between typing and writing, internet’s change of our natural reading and ability of thinking, as well as affective side of artificial intelligence. Carr mentioned that he started struggling and getting distracted by reading two or three pages of information. Later on, he discovered that surfing of the websites had the aptitude to weaken our ability of thinking and making us avoid reading. For example, the internet contains large amount of data but our brains are initiated into focusing on entertainment. The environment surrounding us also influences our brains as pointed by Carr. Nietzsche got a typewriter and started losing focus after completing a few pages. He started experiencing headaches and panicked that he would give up. After learning on how to type perfectly, his words drifted from his mind to the page. As time went by, Nietzsche’s writing became defective. Taylor used to carry a stopwatch into the Midvale steel plant with an aim of improving efficiency from the mechanists. He created special instructions to help employees work and improve at their jobs. Despite the company’s raise in productivity, the workers felt that he had turned them into automatons. Google is a leader in the change of human intelligence into artificial one. Google’s aim is to become “the perfect search engine” through media. Once an individual scours through internet, advertisement companies make more money. Human intelligence is different from artificial, in that the brain can work easily and naturally by making ideas that add different cognitive operations. On the other hand, artificial intelligence only neutralizes a pattern that acts like the human brain, which seems impossible to copy.