On "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

First off, I have to say that I really enjoyed this article.

I must admit that I was guilty immediately of what Mr. Carr talks about. I looked at the title of the article and started thinking about it without reading the article. If I had come across this article online and seen it was seven pages I would not have read the entire thing.

Mr. Carr's point could easily be misunderstood by anyone who doesn't actually read the article and even by someone who does read the article. His point is that Google and the net are not making us stupid because we are losing knowledge. In fact, we are gaining knowledge and we get more little snippets. However, we are changing, maybe losing, our ability to reason and derive our own deductions from axioms.

Carr talks about different ways that technology has changed writing styles and learning styles. He uses the examples of the typewriter changing Nietzche's style and Taylor's scientific management. He even mentions Socrates's fear of a decline due to changing technologies. This would all suggest that we are simply getting worse and worse simply for the sake of efficiency. Google, Carr says, is the root of this in our modern society.

I agree with Mr. Carr on many of his points. He addresses the issue that our learning style is changing and that our elastic minds are deteriorating in their ability to think for themselves. He's suggesting that we are capable of teaching old dogs new tricks, but those new tricks aren't always good for us. There is a great deal of validity to be had here. We now seem to just read headlines and tidbits of information and assume that is the story and all we do is take the facts as they are presented. Sometimes this is good, sometimes these facts are slanted, but either way we're not thinking for ourselves and drawing conclusions from which we can learn.

The idea that we are getting too much breadth and not enough depth is an interesting one. I agree that perhaps in a strict context, this is true. We read a little bit about a lot of news articles and never have more than two or three facts behind each one. This means everyone runs around trying to make it seem like he or she knows what he or she is talking about when no one really does.

In another context, it would be silly to say that one has too much breadth. I say this because if you think about it, this would completely discredit a liberal arts education and well-roundedness in knowledge. Those of the brightest thinkers in history were certainly men of liberal arts that had a great deal of broad knowledge in so many areas and just happened to be skilled at two or three (i.e. Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, Plato).

In general I thought the article was well-written. The organization was done well and the rhetoric was done in an educated vernacular style that's easy to read but also skilled. It was necessary for these ideas to be put out there and I'm glad Mr. Carr did that.