Is Google Making Us Stupid?

This essay was disturbing from the first sentence. Nicholas Carr began his article with dialogue from the end of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. He described the scene (humans coldly disconnecting a pathetic, pleading robot's brain circuits) in a way that made the robot seem more human than the humans, if that makes any sense. The point I think Carr was trying to make with this intro was that technology is changing us, and not for the better. Carr goes on to explain the various ways modern technology is negatively affecting our minds, claiming that the way we process information is changing.

There are undeniable advantages to living with technology, of course. Carr talks about how his life as a writer completely changed once it was possible to Google a necessary fact or a quote in a few seconds when it had once taken him days. However, in Carr's words, "Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." Apparently, everyone is doing this now (including me). When we read articles, we seek "efficiency" and "immediacy" more than anything else. Our brains can easily reprogram themselves to adapt to change, and as our minds have become accustomed to the "crazy quilt" of the Internet, "Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets." Our minds are under an almost constant ambush for attention from the media, and as a result, our concentration is easily broken. It's become more difficult for us to focus on one thing for too long before something else grabs us away.

Despite technology's many good points, reading this article kind of made me wonder if it was worth it. I quickly tossed that thought aside because, yeah, technology is so worth it, but it was still disconcerting to read about it's side effects.