Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Before I even started reading this essay, I was entranced by it. The title itself actually made me question my own thoughts on Google. Is it making me stupid? Or is it making me lazy? By that I mean, is it forcing me to use it as my only resource for information?

Nicholas Carr seemed to talk more about the Internet in general than just Google in this essay. This, thankfully, did not disappoint me because it expanded my thoughts and questions I had earlier when I thought he was only going to talk about Google.

In a way, I think he's right about our reliance on the Internet. For instance, I'm a teenager who uses the Internet everyday. It's not like I lack a life, but more so I want to either learn stuff (simple stuff that I wonder about) or I want to stay in contact with my friends and family. The Internet is sometimes considered a gateway, if you will, that opens us all up to a world where we can access infinite knowledge. But if this is true, then why is Mr. Carr proposing that it lowers our intelligence?

He brought up an interesting topic earlier in the essay about how Scott Karp, a blogger, confessed that he no longer reads books even though he is a literary major. Mr. Karp admitted to using the Internet more often because he is able to learn information within minutes rather than spend hours in a library searching for a book with the same information. Personally, even though I found this example to be interesting, I also found it to be a bit unrelated to stupidity.

Nicholas Carr started giving me the idea that we as people become more "lazy" than "stupid" when using the Internet. It is a much quicker source, so why not use it? But then again, are we being fair to those librarians?

Before I even finished the essay, I came to my own conclusion on this topic: the Internet for people is usually a form of entertainment more than it is a way of obtaining information. Sure, we can learn about stuff by using the Internet just as much as we can with books; but there are only a select few of people who can get the same joy out of reading on their own as they can chatting with their friends on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, AOL, MSN, etc. When people use the Internet for these purposes (Not judging them if they do or not. I know I talk to friends on Facebook) rather than grasp knowledge about the world, they are basically finding a substitute for the television. In fact, I kind of wished Nicholas Carr would have written an essay focused all about watching T.V. I know I would have found that to be even more fascinating.

At the end of the essay, I couldn't help but laugh when I connected the dots and realized that a man writing about how the Internet is making us stupid is actually using the Internet to have us see it. I found it cool because it was almost like he knew people would only get a glimpse of his opinion by using the very source he was griping about. Ironic, isn't it?