24 pages • 48 minutes read
Nicholas CarrIs Google Making Us Stupid?
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Allusion
The two most salient instances of allusion are Carr’s framing device of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and his references to Nietzsche. His allusion to Nietzsche details an anecdotal account of how the typewriter altered the famous philosopher’s writing style, and therefore the character of his intellectual offerings. These allusions bolster Carr’s argument in both a cerebral and emotional sense. By alluding to cultural touchpoints whose influence and longevity speak for themselves, Carr hopes to bank on what his audience already knows to tell them what they may not: that the Internet is a force to be reckoned with.
First-Person Perspective
Throughout the essay, Carr uses a first-person perspective and personal anecdotes from his life and his friends’ lives. This makes the essay much more accessible and emotionally affecting than a cold, scientific approach. As Carr’s central argument is that the Internet is overly mechanizing intellectual processes, this literary devices’ production of a humanized and warm atmosphere is especially noteworthy. Through his conversational and personalized writing style, Carr hopes to make a human connection that will produce more nuanced and passionate investigation of the Internet’s ill effects.
Analogy
To demonstrate the far-reaching effects of the Internet, Carr must first get his reader to understand its enormity. It is naturally difficult to conceptualize the historical impact of something that we are experiencing in real time. Carr therefore analogizes the Internet as a technology to the clock and the printing press, in a bid to pull the wool from over his reader’s eyes. Both the clock and the printing press had international effects on human society and our conception of both the world and ourselves. Because of the passage of time, we can examine these effects in a sustained, careful, and detailed manner. For Carr, we have no such luxury with the Internet, as we are experiencing its revolutionary nature in real time, and its conventions act to speed up time by delivering information in the most efficient manner. His analogization of these previous technologies to the Internet therefore illustrates the profound and often irrevocable effects of ubiquitously-adopted technology.
Expert Testimony
Throughout the text, Carr relies upon his citation of various experts in the fields of theory and culture to bolster his own argument. By citing scholarship that aligns with his own, he displays his own careful contemplation of the topic at hand, thereby increasing his credibility in the eyes of the reader. His selected citations, which provide supporting details and illustrations for his own points, also lend him and his ideas greater credibility. The citation of expert testimony makes it so that Carr is not a solitary voice, although he does view himself as a pioneering one.
