Is Google Making Us Stupid
Omar93
reviewofcarr.docx
Is Google Making Us Stupid
Technology cognition conduit
Artificial brain media stimuli
Malleable intellectual technologies
Efficiency
Carr’s Thesis combines a few arguments that question mankind’s dependence on the newest technology, the Internet:
Carr summarizes part of his argument by stating, “The Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind” (227). In other words, Internet technology has absorbed all of the other technologies available to mankind as of today such as television, radio, printing press, calculator, telephone, and clock which places a great deal of influence on the consumer/user’s thinking (230). Carr fears a negative consequence on the way we think, as the Net tends to shape/control our thinking (231). In fact Carr argues that the Net changes our thinking to the way someone/unknown wants (232).
Carr concludes his thesis by suggesting that the founders of Google have a deeper motive for control of the consumer: artificial intelligence either supplemented or replacing human brains (232).
Form and Organization
Carr begins by providing background information on the problem of his subject the net (paragraphs 1-9): Internet influences the way people read and think by controlling and changing thought process (gives examples)
Next Carr explores how past technologies have shaped our thinking by providing examples (typewriter, clock, paragraphs 10-15) but highlights the computer as altering our brain at a biological level (230).
Carr summarizes technologies influence specifically the WEB by stating that it has “played so many roles in our lives- or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts” and questions the ethics of such control (The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure 231).
Carr continues by stating that the influence exerted by other technologies in our lives using Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (231) is what Googleplex is doing to our lives. The Google founders ambition/goal is to harness the “world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (232) in the form of artificial intelligence. The founders claim that mankind will be better off if our brains were “supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence.”
Carr ends by warning that mankind will be turned into “pancake people- spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button” 234).
