Is Google Making Us Stupid?

On a Saturday afternoon, a young college student noticed that as she was reading chapter three for her sociology class, it was quite difficult to focus. She found herself constantly picking up her phone and scrolling through Instagram (a social network) to look at photos, friends have updated. The student goes back to the reading but still couldn't manage to keep her full attention on the reading for more than ten minutes without looking through her phone for new emails and updates. In an essay written by Nicholas Carr, "Is Google making us Stupid?", Carr argues how the Internet may diminish our capacity for concentration and contemplation. He explains, "My mind now expects to take information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving steam of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski" (Carr, 534). Later that day, the student recognized a similar pattern when searching through the web. She was skimming from site to site; looking at the latest trends, while she also looked up the weather and listens to Rihanna's new hit "Stay". The student perceive that the habits she is accustomed to: multitasking, skimming, and tripping from one thing to another, while using the internet, are the same behaviors she undertakes while reading. But its furthermore then just diminishing the capacity for concentration, the Internet according to Carr and other references, also affects the way of thinking. In his essay, Carr introduces James Olds, a professor of neuroscience, to explain how the brain, "has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions." (Carr, 536). The student is a victim of this. She became so used to surfing the web and skimming through, her mind started thinking it was able to multitask the same way the computer does. It is reflected as she was reading; she kept