Conversant Notes: "Is Google making us stupid?"

Nicholas Carr’s article embraces the idea of skeptisism in our infinite information age involving the vast use of the internet and how modern technology effects our process of learning information. He mentions that the system of the internet’s information highway was designed to create “perfect efficiency” of information and communication. In his introduction Carr suggests that the internet age has created a change in thinking, especially in reading. He shares his own experience relating an increase of internet use and other technology to the decrease in the ability to “deep read”, to concentrate and internally comprehend reading materials. He also describes coming to this realization with a sense that there is “someone or something tinkering with my brain” and goes on to point out for many “the Net is becoming a universal medium” in encompassing the debatable question, “Is Google making us stupid?”

Many of us could agree that we are in the midst of many changes in the way we read and think about today’s media. Some of us can identify with how the internet produces a style of skimming text versus deeply understanding the content in which we are reading. In exploring both sides to this debate, Carr explains the advantages of having information at our fingertips as “the perfect recall of silicon memory” and how it can be a boost to thinking, but it comes with a price. “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation”, Carr states . It is interesting how he compares his mind to being” a scuba diver in the sea of words” in deep reading and thinking as apposed to “jet skiing” on the surface.

In our society today we are valued for how we interpret the content of what we read and how quickly we are able to process that information to create productivity. Despite my own concerns of this being an era of too much information, I too find internet research to be both helpful and a hinderance in communication. Being aware of the changes in how we read and interpret information will help us to make necessary moves to counter-act the unsavory effects of reading on the internet. Ultimately it seems it is up to us as readers to expose ourselves to various forms of text including written print and to recognize when we are merely “jet skiing” the surface of information.