Reading Responce #5

Kyle Barclay
English 100

Reading Response #5



Nicholas Carr, author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” makes many claims about how the internet is affecting people’s lives. He talks much about how people now days have a change in thinking when it comes to researching or reading off the internet. In other words, the internet has altered many people’s mental habits. Carr also elaborates much on the idea of how newer writing equipment is taking part in organizing and forming our thoughts. One of the central claims that Carr makes is that “Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.” His reasoning for this is that we can now just log onto a computer and make quick clicks on hyperlinks to find the information we need in no time at all. This claim interested me because when I was younger, many of my teachers would have us look up information in books, rather than on the web. After finding a certain amount of sources and information in the books, we could then move on using the internet. I personally agree with what Carr has to say here because research does now only take a few clicks on the internet to find information. You can just about find any information on the internet by typing in what you are looking for on a search engine. Another claim that I found interesting was when Carr said “But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking – perhaps even a new sense of self.” The reasoning behind this is that “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.” Reading now, compared to years ago has completely changed. On the internet, the way people talk and write is different from what a person would find in book. “We are how we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. I believe that that statement is true as well. This is important because some people don’t know that people are reading more than they used to. Overall, Carr makes many strong claims on how we read and research information on the internet.

After reading this Nicholas Carr’s essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” I found that many of his claims were pointed towards the idea that people now turn to the internet to find the information they need, opposed to finding information any other way. Carr claims that “Research that once required says in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes,” but in my opinion, we don’t need him to tell us that. Anyone familiar with researching information has long known that people can just use the internet to find the best source of information.