Is Google Making Us Stupid

I found this article to be interesting, but on the whole, I don’t agree with what the author is saying. The idea that technology can somewhat alter the way we operate and think makes sense to me, but I don’t think it does to the extent that the Nicholas Carr, the author, seems to believe it does.

Carr’s assertion that the Net is at fault for his decreasing “capacity for concentration and contemplation” is, in my opinion, not backed up well enough. As he says in the article, there is no scientific results that back this up and in my personal experience, use of the Internet does not, at least significantly, affect a persons ability to concentrate and contemplate. I use the Internet every day for various purposes, and I don’t feel my ability to concentrate and comprehend while reading has been reduced.

Another problem I had with article was the assumption that the change that is cause by the Internet will be a bad change. Carr gives several examples, including writing and Gutenberg’s printing press, of technology that was predicted to have negative effects, but which actually turned out to be very useful and not as bad as initially thought. These new forms of technology did have some negative side effects, but the positives outweighed the negatives. History often repeats itself, and I expect that this trend of largely positive change from new tech will continue with the Internet; the positive aspects that we take on from it will outweigh the negative effects it might have.