To Google or not to Google?

In the blog titled “Google Makes Us Stupid” Michael Fitzgerald argues the point that Nicholas Carr makes in his article for the Atlantic, entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In this article by Fitzgerald, he explains how this argument, on the use of tools, has begun to handicap society since the age of Plato. In the days of Plato writing became the tool to write down ideas and concerns. Plato feared this idea because he felt it was a way to chronicle ideas rather than hold on to them and continue to challenge it.

Fitzgerald writes in his blog:
Carr is not a Luddite per se, but he joins a long line of techno-skeptics going all the way back to Socrates, who argued that people should not write things down, because it would impair their memories (Carr knows this, and mentioned Socrates in his essay).

Fitzgerald also writes this in response to Carr’s article in the Atlantic:
What’s most novel here is his argument about how technology changes us. He cites the development of the clock, which changed the rhythm of life. He writes: “In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.” He also relates a vignette about how using a typewriter changed the way Nietzsche wrote. And then he segues into the Internet, which “is becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewrite, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

It is certainly changing the way we work — we use e-mail to replace direct conversations, we mine data to learn things about our customers they themselves don’t realize, and it appears to flatten organizations — and render many of our jobs obsolete (Carr, in his book, notes that Skype has double the customers of British Telecom and about 99,800 fewer employees). It is unclear what will emerge from this digital maelstrom. But are we being reprogrammed, our brains shifting their circuits to honor how the Web works?

It seems the Fitzgerald is using his blog to defend the Google nation. He even goes as far as saying the users of Google will inevitably outlive Google in the near future. He even quotes Robert Darnton, the director of the university Library at Harvard as saying:
Companies decline rapidly in the fast-changing environment of electronic technology. Google may disappear or be eclipsed by an even greater technology, which could make its database as outdated and inaccessible as many of our old floppy disks and CD-ROMs. Electronic enterprises come and go. Research libraries last for centuries. Better to fortify them than to declare them obsolete, because obsolescence is built into the electronic media.

In conclusion Fitzgerald uses rhetorical questions, which are carefully embedded in his blog to try and defuse the potent juggernaut that was unleashed upon the world via the words of Nicholas Carr.