Adaption and Change - The Internet

The internet is making us stupid; or is it? Nicholas Carr exemplifies throughout his text, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" that the internet has had many influential changes to the human brain since its upbringing and massive popularity. “A style that puts ‘efficiency’ and ‘immediacy’ above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.” Is this bad? Are we deteriorating as intellectuals because we read information through the internet in different ways? Carr certainly thinks so. But, I counter, what is it that makes the internet and our changing habits bad? Can we not continue to prosper as long as we see the relationship?

Carr says that “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” Though the internet may be interrupting his normal habits of concentration, there is no way that the Net is interfering with Carr’s sense of contemplation. Carr is reading into the internet farther than he believes. Thus the internet, while Carr believes has deteriorated his contemplation, has, in fact, furthered the knowledge to contemplate. For example, Carr has contemplated and written a response to the internet’s influence on his life, though he believes it to be a negative influence.

Further, I cannot, in good conscious, say that every intellectual is influenced negatively by the use of the internet. Rather, it has been proven that many intellectuals see the relationship between themselves and the internet, and they rebel. In my own class, there are some who have declared independence from the internet for some certain purposes. Thus it is very hard to say that Google is making us stupid, or for that matter that the internet is. While Carr may have a point that the internet has changed each of us intellectually, it is also true that the change may have been for the better.