The change in our way of thinking

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” said Sir Isaac Newton. This is a quote that has influenced me strongly throughout my childhood as I was learning such things as algebra. I find this expression particularly relevant to the question, “Is Google making us stupid?” Is it, we’ve been brought up learning about all the advantages of the internet or the so called information age. However, we’ve never exactly looked through the disadvantages of having the internet. I prefer to think that it is purely because there are not many of them other than stuff like facebook addictions but the fact remains that we think how we were brought up to think.


Though I was pretty sure of it, I’ve always been too lazy to do any research on my own. And suddenly, here is an 8 page research paper describing if and how Google is making idiots of us. Wonderfully written, Carr not just puts forward and backs up his point but also goes back through history and shows similar examples of pivotal change in the expression of thought and actually disproves his own arguments, saying that while he might be paranoid just like Aristotle once was, the possibility of it being true still exists.


Carr’s main point includes his observation of the decreased attention span of everyone around him, including himself. He points out that once he was content to simply sit and enter into a book for a lengthy period of time but now he doesn’t have the patience to read a 3 paragraph blog post – instead preferring to skim over it. He goes on to say that the net is “chipping away his capacity for concentration and contemplation”. Carr goes on to say that the way we think is related to the way we read. He asserts his statement with studies from various institutions that back him up. He also goes through history and looks at people’s reaction to such previous changes such as the Italian humanist’s thinking that the easy availability of books would make men less “studious” and bring about a weakening of their minds and Foreman’s theory of people being turned into “pancake people” – being spread wide and thin due to the vast amount of information accessed by the mere touch of a button. Ultimately, Carr’s point is that Google is making us stupid, even though past history shows otherwise – but the ability to have that much information without any effort was never available before.


From what I’ve learned of people’s internet reading and writing habits in English 105, I see that Carr was right on track. We barely do any writing on the internet seeing that we spend most of our time on it. As for reading, it seems as though we have been trained to be impatient due to the easy availability and access of resources today. We have largely stopped our abilities to read, comprehend and make “rich connections “of a lengthy text and have almost degenerated ourselves to skimming everything we come across.


“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. This expression has rung true from the start of the written component of human expression to the sudden availability of a wide range of books in the 15th century. These improvements in writing and reading have sparked a great flow of ideas that, if one looks back, comes mainly from the start of writing since actually writing down something is something you can build off on and each new betterment to “human expression” leads to more ideas. However, it seems we have run into a brick wall this time. Improvements to human expression that started out a whole new army of great ideas not seem to actually stop us since we have changed the “way we think” – something that has not happened before.