“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
Since its creation in the 1990s, the internet has been an immense tool in acquiring knowledge in an instant. To help with the pursuit of knowledge, search engines, such as Google, have continuously been created in hopes of being the better way of finding specific information. Recently, there has been some concern about the constant use of Google and how it affects peoples’ mentality. The people who are against using Google on every search claim that the engine is making people stupid by replacing learning knowledge and critical thinking skills with simply obtaining information at the quickest convenience. It has become an issue because people are no longer retaining the information they are reading because people seem to be only concerned about getting the information quickly. One of the people who believes that Google is making people stupid is Nicholas Carr. Carr is a contributor and writer for The Atlantic as well as published many articles and books related to business, culture, and technology’s effect on people. In his article, “Is Google Really Making Us Stupid?” he effectively argues the dependency of relaying on the internet too much for obtaining knowledge has become harmful to the general public’s intelligence through his appeals to ethos. Carr’s most notable publication was his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains which expands the themes from his The Atlantic article. The main focus of his argument is that reading online is not as thought-provoking as reading from a printed source due to the various advertisements that distract the reader from fully engaging the reading. This essay will examine Carr’s intentions of the article, the targeted audience, and purpose of writing his article as well as the contents of the article. Not only that, but the way Car used the rhetorical devices, such as pathos, ethos, and logos, will be examined in how he made his point come across as effective and factual while also refuting any counter-arguments that may arise.
Throughout his article, Carr’s intention of speaking is to inform the audience about the issue and then state his position on the issue. In order to hook the audience, he opens the article with a quote from the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which depicts an artificial intelligence begging for its life. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it” (Carr, 2008). To give context to the quote, Dave is pulling out the memory circuit wires of the artificial intelligence program, HAL, in hopes that it will kill the machine. The quote can connect with the audience by showing them how constantly reading online is leading them astray from actually grasping the information being read. Carr gives his own testimony on how continuous online reading has affected him which will allow the audience to better understand his argument. “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” (Carr, 2008). Carr educates the audience on the issue through the use of a narration about the process of how his mind used to absorb information from a book. He introduces to the readers how his mind was before he relied on reading from the internet to gain information. “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do..The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle” (Carr, 2008). Carr provides the information to the audience on how his reading capabilities have dropped by stating that the issue came from spending too much time reading online. He makes the claim that he knew that was a change with his reading pattern but he was not aware of the problem causing it was due to being online too much. He praises the internet as being a “Godsend” since he is a writer and its ability to allow anyone immediate access to any form of information someone would be in search of (Carr, 2008). However, he refutes that the easy access of information can be damning to one’s mind by bringing Marshal McLuhan, a philosopher of public intellect and communicative theory, to further explain why the internet is having a harmful effect on people’s minds. Carr educates the readers by stating one of McLuhan’s theories from the 1960s: the media can effectively shape the way a person thinks. Carr uses that information to make his claim that the internet is effecting his capacity to be able of concentration and contemplation when it comes to reading now (Carr, 2008). After explaining the situation to the readers, Carr goes on to point out whom the target audience of his article will be.
Carr makes a point to specifically call out the demographic whom he feels this issue will affect the most: college students. The reason for targeting this demographic is because college students spend a vast amount of time reading online due to eBooks, research, and online courses. As mentioned above, Carr explains his situation about how he went from being able to focus on reading printed material to barely being able to focus after spending a prolonged time reading material online. To make his claim even more effective to his target audience, he brings in the testimony of his literary friends who have also been afflicted with not being able to concentrate after being on the internet for so long. One of his friends Scott Karp, whom manages a blog about online media, admits to Carr that he has stopped reading books completely. Karp confessed that while in college he was a literature major and was an insatiable reader. He speculates that the reason his reading style has changed due to reading on the internet is because the way he thinks has changed (Carr, 2008). He even addresses the usage of skimming, speeding through an article to find the main point, and how it can be a deterrent for when it comes to learning new information, thus connecting skimming with Karp’s change in reading style. Skimming has become the go-to reading for college students when they are presented with a long article to read or in a rush to find the purpose of it. Therefore, Carr’s article can be seen as a cautionary tale for college students who primarily read online.
The purpose of Carr’s article was to state the claim that online reading is negatively impacting the way people read and think. Throughout his article he combines factual evidence with anecdotes. He persuades the audience by including professional studies and narratives that the effect of continuous online reading is a problem that should be addressed. The people who he is targeting to be aware about this issue are online writers, college students, and people who enjoy reading from printer material. The tactics he uses are both effective as well as informative to anyone who would read the article.
The content of the article is mixed with Carr’s narrations, testimonies from his friends, and factual evidence to support their claim. Carr uses his narration to drag the audience into his story and then introduces facts to back up his claim. Carr includes research studies from various credible universities and professionals to make his claim more effective. One study comes from University College London that showed the effective of how online reading can change a person’s reading ability. The university’s study showed evidence that there is a high risk of change in how people read and think due to the amount they spend online. The behavior that was most documented over the research was that people resorted to skimming articles, one or two passages, and then going to another site. The authors of the study state that, “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense” (Carr, 2008). Carr brings in another well-respected professional who has also been studying the issue to further back his claim as to why internet reading is dumbing people down. Maryanne Wolfe, whom is a developmental psychologist at Tuft University, tells Carr that the internet has placed immediacy and efficiency first and lowered people’s capacity for deep reading (Carr, 2008). By including a detailed description of the problem, Carr is once again establishing proof that online reading is changing people’s way of reading. In order to combat any counter-arguments, Carr uses a rhetorical tactic that prevents the readers from forming any arguments against his claim.
Prolepsis are riddled throughout Carr’s article to prevent any reader to assume a counter stance on his claim. These prolepsis use professionals and studies to refute various counter-arguments that people might have for his argument. An example of this is when Carr praises the internet for the increased of reading compared to that of the 1970s or 80s, but attacks it as a “different form” of reading. At that point, he brings in professionals to explain to the audience the difference between the two types of reading. Carr’s statements rely heavily on the use of both ethos and logos.
The use of pathos comes at the beginning of the article when Carr uses the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey to introduce his topic and argument. The reference to the movies was most likely to draw in the audiences who have seen the movie and to remind them of the possible dysphonia that could have happened due to the artificial intelligence going rogue. He later uses him and his friends’ experience to establish a point of how online reading has effected them. This can also be seen as ethos since many of his friends are online bloggers about the issues related to online media. By including them, he is showing that affliction is not something he is imagining but is real and unknowingly affecting other people. The usage of the anecdotes and the reference to a technological movie gives the audience an impression that he is a credible writer.
Carr incorporates ethos into his argument by referencing historical figures to appeal to the ethics of the audience. One of the historical figures he uses for his claim is Socrates. Carr uses the fact that Socrates believed that writing would cause the mind to stop exercising to compare to how reading online can cause a person to lose their ability for deep thinking and reading. Socrates was and still is a highly respected and studied philosopher thereby including him within his article, Carr has established credibility that he knows a bit of information about the human mind.
The ethos is closely followed by logos to back up the claims mentioned. The logos comes in the form of using professional researchers and published studies to inform the audience about the issue from a factual standpoint. Even the friends Carr brings into his essay have an educational background on the topic that is being discussed. Each claim that Carr makes, he brings in a professional to give a detailed explanation on how it affects the person. Although the title of his article includes Google, he broadens the issue by never staying with that one online topic. He encompasses reading in general when it comes to online reading affecting a person’s reading abilities.
Works Cited:
Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, July-Aug. 2008. Web. 27 Mar. 2016.
