Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

In this one article Nicholas Carr criticises the internet with an answer to his own question, "Is the internet (Google) making us unable to think?" Carr opens us his argument by discussing a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a man is disabling the memory circuits of HAL a robot with artificial intelligence. HAL's only response to this was his fear and pain as it felt each one of its memory circuits being removed. From this description, Carr moves into his question by stating that he can feel the mind of humanity changing due to internet influence. Carr moves on to state that the internet changes thinking though its processes of quick information. The internet works to shift human thought from a concentrated innundation of focused ideas, into a widely spread surface of ideas that google deems "related". Humans now have to work harder to focus or think deeply on any one subject. Carr describes how Humans now think as "bouncing" from material to material, and concludes by stating that most men cannot or do not read anything larger than a few pages, but instead skim the sources that they find then move one. Carr continues by discussing how technology influences the thought of men. His biggest example this idea of techonolgy reform ing human thought, was the mechanical clock. Carr stated that this modernization reformed human thinking away from the old experiences and senses to a stricter time in which everything occurs at a specific time and also that everything can be measured and tested. Following his discussion on techonolgy, Carr talked about how Frederick Winslow Taylor changed the focus of industry from the benefit of the worker to the benefit and advancement of the factories themselves. Industrial workers soon became merely mechanized workers which only performed simple tasks without thought or extra input. Carr then applies the story of Taylor to Google and states that Google only cares to provide a better mind and a "more efficient" sense of knowledge. This "more efficient" knowledge forces a shift from deep human thought and into a shallower surface thought in which the masses do not true understand anything but merely are given the false illusion through what they have "read". Carr continues his argument by talking about how writing shifted human though away from memory and more dependant on what is written, and finally concludes his argument by rediscussing the scene from 2001 and states that people are now giving away their humanity and trading it for the mind of a machine.

Nicholas Carr's logic in this argument parallels enlightenment though, especially Immanuel Kant's idea that men should think for themselves and should not allow others to think for them. With Carr the problem is that men are not only refusing the think for themselves but are allowing a machine to think for them. This also parallel's with Paulo Feire's problem with the system of education, in that it "mechanizes" human thought and not only divides students from the world but also asserts the superiority of the teacher over the student. The internet does this same thing in that it cuts off men from the depth of the world through constant changing topics, and also asserts itself as the supreme source of knowledge, therefore suppressing its users into a sense that they nkow nothing and the the internet knows all. Finally Carr's ideas also parallel with Michael Foucault's ideas of humanity. Foucault believes that men generally want to give up their freedom and free thought in order to be ruled. This parallels with Carr's problem with Google in that Google's aim is to entirely remove the free thought of the "obsolete" men and to mechanize them into a system of artificial intelligence which "knows everything".

Is Google an avoidable or necessary obstacle in the progression of human thought?