Is the Internet Ruining our Brains?

          The article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr described about Carr’s experience of the internet making him less patient with obtaining knowledge. I found myself relating to this article quite a bit. Even reading the article I skimmed through it just to find the important things in it, as Carr described in this article.  He talked about how we rely on Google to find things that could take hours to find just searching through books in the library.

Another point he made was how the internet (Google) gradually made it harder to immerse himself in a book or article, because of how quickly you can find information or media. After reading through this, I realized that I can partially relate to what Carr was saying. I often find myself drifting off during a slower paced part of a book, and I cannot focus as well. I think that only trying to find main points in articles is okay, but a lot of information from the article might not have been read.

Carr also said that we do read a lot- with our text messages, emails, Facebook profiles, etc.., but it doesn’t help us in any way. Why aren’t we just able to read 10 pages of a book and not get distracted for at least a few seconds?  Why does it seem so impossible to find information in a book compared to the internet? What would the millions of people that rely on Google every day do if it was just taken away?

Finding information on Google however, does help with our learning quite a bit, but when we are required to read a few pages in our history textbook, or a novel, what do we do? We find it to be overwhelming so we won’t read as well as we would if Google didn’t exist. It tends to be much harder to find all the information in a book.

We all use it, we all make Google searches. I don’t think that Google is making us dumb at all. Google is just making us learn differently by obtaining information quickly instead of handling the duration of a whole 20 pages, but disabling us in a way that makes reading longer articles harder. I agree with Carr’s analogy, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet- Ski”, but I do not think it’s making us stupid. We’re not dumb, just handicapped.