Homework #9 -- Is Google Making Us Stupid...I Think Yes!

According to the article Is Google Making us Stupid, “People have come so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence” (Carr). People have become way to dependent on technology in general and the Internet for information. People have the ability to find out information about anything in seconds. Because we are so dependent on the Internet, we do not depend on our own ability to know information; instead, we look information up instantly. This has made our society very impatient as we do not have to take time to find out information. Carr states, “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense” (Carr). As a society, we do not like to take the time to read long articles; instead, we skim the main points to get the idea. As technology is growing, we do not have a huge attention span, and depend on the Internet for everything. Google has made the Internet very accessible as their mission is, ““to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”” (Carr). This has made Google popular, as people go to it for everything. Essentially, human beings have become “stupid” because of Google. The quick information that we search is hardly retained, and we do not remember the information easily. If Google did not exist, our society would fail, as people do not have the attention span to look through books.