Is Google Making Us Stoopid?

Nicholas Carr's 2008 cover story in TheAtlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" strikes a chord, or should I say, a note of discord with me. Nicholas G. Carr, an American Writer who is currently working on his book, "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains," suggests that technology is affecting the way mankind thinks. Carr begins his article with a quote from Hal 9000, the distressed computer from Stanley Kubrick's movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey, "Dave, my mind is going..."

"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," Carr wrote. "I'm not thinking the way I used to think."

The article goes on to discuss what the internet and in a larger view, what technology itself is doing to our brains. Carr covers several examples of how technology has affected us including the invention of the printing press, typewriters, and the clock as well as the internet. "Voracious book readers" are quoted to have complained, "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read is changed, i.e. I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?" (Carr, 2)

Questions such as, "Is my mind going?" and "Am I a Luddite?" are asked. Carr closes his article with another reference to 2001, "I am haunted by that scene... What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer's emotional response to the disassembly of its mind." (Carr, 8). What strikes me as even more weird is my numbed reaction to what Carr alleges is happening to my mind. I am left with a question of my own then, "With its many distractions has the internet induced a semi-mindless response in me where I am now content to be led and herded much like a contented cow (toward any unknown) as long as I can browse? In other words, will my appitites consume me?