"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

I sure hope not.

Though that is the question Nicholas Carr asks and attempts to answer in his article for the Atlantic Monthly, which he wrote a little over a year ago. (And to think, Twitter, the quick and to-the-point social networking site, wasn't even around a year ago...What does this say about Carr's ideas??) I'm not sure Carr ever reaches a clear answer to his question, but he does provide plenty of information that both confirms and denies reason to be worried. He spends most of the article noting how people's attention spans have shortened, and their ability to think deeply and critically has weakened. He even gave a few examples of intellectual writers and readers who have changed their once laborious habits into new, significantly condensed forms. Forms, Carr argues, that replicate those produced by the Internet. "Media," he says "are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought." It is only natural then, for people to think like a computer "thinks" - quickly, precisely, and factually. This is fine, except that it "leaves little place for the fuzziness of contemplation." Put simply, we are beginning to think less like humans and more like machines. We are losing our tendency to question. How horrifying is that? And what's more, the people working for Google seem to have made it their main goal in life to harness artificial intelligence and create an artificial brain that may even be smarter than the typical human brain. (!)

While the romantic in me does not like this one bit, my realistic side knows that the Internet is not a bad thing. Sure, it may be changing our way of thinking, but we are still thinking. The very fact that there is such advanced technology is because we (people, in general) have been able to think about and then create it. And no, I don’t think Google is making us stupid. (Spoiled and slightly lazy? Yes. But not stupid.) It provides us with more information than we could ever need or want, all we have to do is press a few keys and click a few buttons. It really is a pretty ideal system. The only thing that would be stupid would be to not take advantage of it.

To further this argument, most (if not all) of my English 105 classmates reported that they visited Google, along with numerous other websites, and none of us are stupid. In fact, we are still capable of carrying on intelligent discussions and thoughtfully reading, ingesting, translating, and rewriting information placed before us.