Response to "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Before I get into anything else, I want to say that this essay by Nicholas Carr was definitely my favorite of the three I've read so far. It interested me the most--so much of what Carr wrote reminded me of the fascinating things I learned about in AP Psychology last year. I just couldn't put it down. Carr had a well-supported idea too--he had at least one quote, study, or new point on every page. Most importantly, though: it was relatable.

After scratching my head all the way through Erdrich's article, I can not tell you how much I appreciated reading about something that pertains to just about every hour of every day of my life; Google has been my best friend longer than any person ever has been. I was anxious to read about something that I rely on so often, especially since the title suggested that this relationship of mine isn't really a good thing. "How could something that is designed to give information make me stupid?" I wondered, not wanting to believe that my closest companion could be doing me wrong. To my extreme dismay, Carr was able to answer this question quite thoroughly in his article. The Internet really has changed me (I thought friends weren't supposed to make you change!), and I really don't like it.

I can't stop thinking about it either. For me, this negative transformation is so evident. I can rarely focus. I get bored with homework. I get bored with reading (at present, I have six books on my bed-side table that I have started and can't get myself to finish). More than anything else, though: I Google, I skim, and I hastily sniff out the one sentence, the one paragraph, the one name, the one date, or the one something else on the web that answers my question. Before reading this essay, I thought that this use of the Internet--the way I can peruse over page after page, navigating quickly through a literal and metaphorical web of information--made my thinking more advanced. I had decided that speed was equivalent to efficiency and effectiveness. The faster I could figure something out, the sooner I could move on to "learning" the next thing and, in turn, the more I could "learn". It took this article to help me see that that's really not the case.

Thanks to Carr's essay, I'm wondering how many things I've actually learned as opposed to temporarily memorized long enough to regurgitate on tests or in papers. I bet there are more of those things than there are pages I've turned in books I've read in the past year. While reading Carr's article, I could most easily relate this learning and cognition of mine to Bruce Friedman's idea of "staccato" quality thinking. I bounce around from phrase to phrase, passage to passage, or site to site, collecting what I need from each, which I think is what Friedman meant when he explained it. However, I think my own "staccato" thinking extends beyond just accumulating the information in that I not only learn in a "staccato" way, I also recall information in a "staccato" way. During a test I bounce around my brain just like I would on the Internet, searching for that one thought that will answer question 43. It's so. . . not how it should be.

I notice this at home too. If I ask my older sister for help with homework questions when she's around, she almost always pulls an encyclopedia or two off the shelf (we have an entire World Book set that I haven't touched in years), flips them open, and looks for everything she can find about the topics I inquired about. She focuses on the entire subject of each question. I, on the other hand, can be found a few feet away, springing from site to site on the Net, looking to find those single pieces of information I need. In the end we both find the answers. She looks them up in books, and I look them up on the Internet. It sounds like a fair trade-off, but after reading this essay, it feels more like I'm having the Net read the books for me. It's like I can't handle reading a few pages in a book about each topic to find my answers. I need search engines like Google to guide me directly to them whereas my sister's search engine is. . .well. . .her brain.

She's thirty-one years old, meaning that just fifteen years ago she was in high school learning how to find the answers she needs. Just fifteen years ago, she learned that to research means to look information up in a book. These days, students like me (because I'm assuming I'm not alone here) have almost completely lost the ability to do this, or at least the desire to. I mean, honestly, how many of us have groaned when told that there's a required number of book sources for a research paper we have to write? How did we come to cast off this resource in just fifteen years? Could I say fifteen one more time? Probably!

All of that being said, I'm going to confess that I have no clue how I'd get by devoid of the Internet. I'm not saying that I couldn't manage without it; I'm just admitting that I've never even considered using something else instead. I use the Net for so much. We use the Net so much. Our AP Composition class is completely connected because of this blog (and I bet we're all Facebook friends too). All of our instructions and materials have to be accessed using the McFarland High School website. And, in all honesty, I used Google seven different times just while writing this blog. (This is probably where I would insert a clip of Brittney Spears singing "Slave 4 U" if YouTube wasn't throwing a hissy fit right now. . .go figure.)

I guess we just have to hope that we can reach a healthy stopping point in this technological expansion. Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, claims that the company is motivated "to solve problems that have never been solved before," but I think that Mr. Schmidt needs to realize that a big reason why some problems have never been solved before is because they've never been problems before. To me, it seems like half of technological advancement is convincing people that there's something wrong with something they're doing or something they have. While there are things out there that really can be made better with new technology, I think we're going to reach that "enough is enough" point fairly soon if we haven't already. The last thing I want is for Stanley Kubrick's prophecy to come true, and I would hope that I'm not the only one that feels that way.