Is Google Making Us Stupid?

It is an interesting question that is posed by author Nicholas Carr. He writes early in the article for the Atlantic that something is different.
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.

He feels that his capacity for learning is being diminished via the use of technology and its sheer and utter convenience. He carefully crafts a well constructed essay on how the technology and its ease of access have both good qualities and bad. He carefully constructs a rhetorical dialogue between both of these schools of thought that in the ends condemns Google and all internet research.
Carr uses an almost perfect metaphor that describes the mind shaping power of the internet when it writes:
“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

This is a beautiful example that is both accurate and visually stimulating for the reader. The deep reading that we once did, where we could immerse ourselves deeply in texts and be able to craft excellent nuggets of intuitive interpretations, have given rise to our inability to process large amounts of text because of our reliance of the internet.

Carr furthers his claim by suggesting immediate results that come from the pressing of just a few keys on a keyboard has removed the inefficiency of spending weeks researching in the library and thus becomes a valuable resource. He even quantifies this analysis when he quotes Bruce Friedman, a blogger on computers and technology, as saying:
“I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year.”
Carr goes even further in damning the internet format for reading and researching when he writes about Maryanne Wolf’s study. This evidence he provides lashes out at all contemporary technology as a reason for people’s inability to immerse themselves in “sea of words”:

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

To help Carr make his point he quotes the neuroscience professor who directs the Kransnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, James Olds.
“even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

Humans end up taking on the qualities of the technologies that we use. It is the case of the tool changing the way the operator works. This argument was established way back when Plato argued against the use of writing in the intellectual pursuits and still rage in schools today with the use of calculators and spell check. People are always arguing against the use of technology for the reasons of too much reliance or fear of its ability to control and change our patterns of thought. It is not a new thing and I am sure it is not the last time we will hear it. Technology: writing, the use of a word processor or spell check can only be the tools at the disposal of the user. It is the user that ends up allowing these items to take control of their thought patterns. I am not sure how one can ascertain how the internet can make us stupid. It is in fact, we have allowed ourselves to become lazier because of the internet’s ease of use. It is people that have lost the desire to pursue “Truth” and settle with facts. Facts that we do not store in our own residual memories in order to be able to recall when needed. We have in fact found it easier to search and agree with the first post found after a search. We are allowing ourselves to become reprogrammed because it is easier than actually learning.