Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nicholas Carr narrated his essay based on a thesis, by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001movie: A Space Odyssey. A character named Bowman, whom has been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “brain. ” The super computer Hal pleads, “Dave my mind is going. ” “I can feel it, I can feel it.
” (pg. 226) Mr. Carr supports this thesis by giving his experience online and quotes by others, relating to how people rely on the web. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
He researched, quotes from a pathologist, scholars, a psychologist, philosophers, a sociologist, a historian and cultural critic, a scientist, a mathematician, the New York Times director, a play writer, Google founders, and Mr. Carr even gave an example of a young man who carried a stopwatch to a steel plant and began maximum speed, efficiency, and output experiments “his system. ” Fredrick Winslow Taylor “system” was applied to all acts of manual labor, which remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. (pg.
228-231) I believe when Mr.Carr wrote this essays purpose, he stated he was not the only one spending a lot of time online, searching, surfing and sometimes adding to the databases of the internet. He mentioned this to his friends and acquaintances. Many of them had similar experiences. (pg.
226-227) Mr. Carr compares what Taylor did for the work of the hand to what Google is doing to the mind. Carr informs the world of the two men who founded Google; they spoke frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence. He relates this to super computer Hal, “Machinelike. ”At first I thought Mr. Carr’s tone was a bit confusing, one minute he was feeling a uncomfortable sense someone or something was tinkering with his mind then he said his mind is not going.
As I read on toward the end he said he seems confident giving data of his research. He mentioned being worried, fear, skeptical, afraid, and haunted. (Pg. 234) This essay has been viewed by face book, 65k times, tweeter, 1517 times, and 4. 5k on Google.
The strengths are excellent data, the weaknesses is too lengthy with concerning others experiences. Too many examples get boring, which causes my mind to wander. I have a short tolerance for narration and biography stories.
