An Understanding of "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr

 

Nicholas Carr, in the article Is Google Making Us Stupid? points out how we are losing our ability to think and that people are lacking patience to read a long article and prefer short statements or points. Many people also prefer not use their own thinking capacity and rely on artificial intelligence to do the work for them. People try to skim through paragraphs instead reading and actually understanding information. The use of internet is making our attention span lesser and lesser, leading us to get distracted in a small amount of time. Also, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, typing instead of writing makes our style of writing different, like using new idioms. The German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler said that Nietzsche’s prose changed from arguments to aphorism, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style. He is trying to say that our style of prose slowly changes when we use more of the modern machines. We can see that now-a-days people use short forms of words which look like a completely new word. The short versions of words used in a continuous way makes the text look like a completely different language which the old people might not understand, personally it is difficult for me to read those words as I am not used those short versions of words. I also noticed that, people using the AI more and more makes its style of prose more and more human like while the AI images people make is getting more and more real is scary. It’s getting difficult to separate what is AI and what is real.

In the article, it is mentioned that we people adapt to the technologies we use in our daily lives, such as the mechanical clock. We try to avoid our biological clock and go according to the mechanical clock, i.e., we eat food according to the time of the day like breakfast, lunch and dinner instead of eating when we are actually hungry sleeping when the clock tells us to sleep and waking according to out alarm instead of actually doing what our body wants. Doing so to some extent makes our body tired, like waking up feeling tired, not feeling hungry when it’s time to eat or not feeling the urge to eat, maybe feeling hungry in a time which is not meant for eating. The society as a whole is being forced to adapt to such a lifestyle as we are told to reach for work at a certain time. We can also take the example of the calculator; I think many people including me has lost the ability to calculate large numbers and use the calculator on our phones for any requirement of calculation. People used to remember 10-digit phone numbers during the time of telephones and now people can’t even remember more than two phone numbers because it is already saved in our phones and a few clicks dials to person we want to call.