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.
Themes
The Internet’s Power to Restructure Human Cognition and Consciousness
Carr asks us to go beyond merely recognizing the effect that the Internet has on the availability of massive amounts of information, and to consider that it affects the information that is available and shapes the way that that information is processed and used. The internet’s mandate for efficiency has indeed produced a treasure trove of easily and instantaneously accessible stores of knowledge. However, Carr believes that too much time is spent in adulation of this positive aspect of the Internet to properly attend to the technology’s full effect on human cognition and consciousness. For him, there’s too much focus on the what of the internet and not the how: how it shapes and limits human intellectual inquiry. He asks his reader to evaluate how the drive toward ever more efficiency flattens and reshapes human cognitive processes and impoverishes the intellectual life as a result.
The Impact of the Internet’s Breakneck Pace on Human Intellectual Life
For Carr, the printed word allows and encourages the reader to spend time in contemplation. It allows the reader to turn ideas over in his or her mind, and to let ideas percolate and announce their connection to other ideas over time and sustained consideration. In his view, the Internet’s proliferation of texts designed to instantly hook the reader and dispense bite-sized bits of information runs contrary to the norms and consequences of the printed word—with impoverishing effects upon human intellectual life. For Carr, the mechanized mandates of the factory, upon which the Internet is built, have no place in human intellectual life, which should be deliberate and slow. In Carr’s perspective, the breakneck pace of the Internet, and its constant restructuring to allow for even greater efficiency, as well as its influence on other written media, are all things that we should not passively accept. He believes that the factory’s mandates for as much work in as little time as possible should not dictate the contours of human intellectual life. In Carr’s perspective, human thought and the production of human knowledge benefit from sustained consideration over time and the space to make subtle connections between ideas. This process is interrupted by Internet norms that focus on delivering paradigmatic “wisdom” in easily digestible pieces. For Carr, this is a dangerous interruption that has the potential to rob civilizations of the intricate character of all the knowledge that took hundreds of years to accumulate and perfect.
Technology as an Unquestioned Paradigm of Human Existence
Carr uses historical allusions, most saliently to the printing press, to drive this point home. By demonstrating the vast social and cognitive impact of the printing press, he reminds us that things were not always the way we find them to be now. Just as there was a moment in time in America when written texts were not widely available, so there was a time before the Internet. Both the Internet and the printing press have huge implications for the nature of human society, the nature of knowledge, and the pursuit of knowledge. An awareness of these things can easily be lost when the technology that created them becomes taken for granted as the norm. By parsing the huge effect of the printing press, Carr invites the reader to consider the huge effect of the Internet, although they are caught up in the middle of that very change—rather than studying it with critical and historical distance. Carr bids the reader to attend to the increasing mechanization of human intellectual life to counter the effects of the Internet before the technology becomes so widely and uncritically accepted that it remodels human cognition and becomes an accepted, unquestioned, and naturalized paradigm for intellectual development.
