Response to Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

It often takes me a while to fully read an article with a lot of words, and Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" was no exception. I don't know how long I spent reading and rereading and taking breaks and watching snippets of Charlie Brown's Christmas on TV, but it was a hefty sum of time, which is ironic considering Carr's article is about how the Internet is slowly rewiring our brains and making "deep reading" a struggle. What should've taken me a few minutes to read dragged out for hours. However, I did make some chocolate pudding on one of my breaks, so I guess it wasn't a total waste of time.

Carr poetically describes the change in his reading style, writing: "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." These are two different ways to have aquatic fun, but one is arguably more enriching, adventurous, and rewarding. Similar to Carr, I, too, used to be perfectly content reading novel after novel from when I hopped off the school bus (my motion sickness prevented me from being that cool kid who reads on the ride home) to late into the night, but now I can't even sit still for one article. As someone who fondly remembers a time before the omnipotence and omnipresence of the Internet, how are today's children's minds being shaped by a technology that wasn't widely available to most until recently? They are born into a world full of iPhones, Androids, tablets, smartwatches, and phrases like "There's an app for that!" and "Let me Google it," a world where printed literature is being hunted to extinction by digital copies, a world where they won't learn to read the same way as generations before. As with most changes, this realization is frightening, especially since "reading...is not an instinctive skill for human beings" in the same way that speech is (Carr).

Is humankind's ability to read for detail and comprehension in jeopardy? Or am I'm just nostalgic for the past? Maybe my fear of society's dependence on the Internet is as preposterous as Socrates' theory that people's reliance on written word will "substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads" (Carr). Silly, right? The brain's plasticity is crucial to our survival and evolution: it not only allows us to recover from traumatic brain injuries, but also guides us to adapt to new technologies like the Net, which has become such an essential part of our daily routines for good reason. I mean, how practical would it be to revert to carrying around physical dictionaries, encyclopedias, Walkmans and boom boxes, graphing calculators, and Rolodexes? They're relics of the past for a reason.

The Internet is the way of the future. It may be making us stupider, but you have to keep up with the times or you'll be left behind with the aforementioned antiques that today's kids learn about on trips to museums.