Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I think Carr’s answer to his title: Is Google Making Us Stupid? is yes. Plain and simple. Carr believes that the Internet has decreased our attention spans, and reduced our ability to think critically. He explains that individuals in our society can no longer be fully immersed in a text because everywhere we look we are given shortened or condensed versions of texts that do not require us to really engage with a piece of writing. Carr describes this, as “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” (1) Although, Carr portrays this issues as not just limited to the Internet. Other technology, like clocks, has begun to rule our lives, rather than the natural way people can wake up and schedule their day. Carr explains that the Internet is consuming our lives; that we now use the Internet for other things than research or email, but now we use it as a map, telephone, newspapers, and television.

The way our society operates therefore has significantly changed with the widespread use of the Internet. Carr explains, “The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well.” (6)

Even though Carr does address that “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.” (2), the kind of reading that we do is far less comprehensive than that of several decades ago.

A very similar stance is taken in Chris Hedges, America the Illiterate.  Hedges describes the illiterate majority of America that “It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés.” (1) Hedges also illustrates that the  “Political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest. They only need to appear to have these qualities.” (2) He further describes the illiteracy of our nations leaders in a set of data depicting the level of diction that Presidents and presidential candidates used during presidential debates throughout the last century. Among the results included George W Bush speaking at a sixth grade level, Kennedy at a tenth grade level, and Lincoln at an eleventh grade level. The Presidents farther back in our history are considered to have been smarter due to a lack in technology that resulted in people reading and writing more and at a higher level. However, this data is not given in context of whether the grade level that each President spoke at is of one time period or the President’s respective time periods. This information can definitely change the interpretation of these results.