reading response 5

The central claim in Nick Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid” is that the web has changed the way people as a whole think. Some people used to be able to read books constantly. Now they can’t even read one without losing focus and quitting for a while. Carr believes that the web is causing this because the web allows people to access a vast amount of information at the click of a button. He explains this using his own personal experience. He used to be able to read a book and now he has a really hard time concentrating on the lengthy text. His friends also notice this about themselves.
One of the two of his most claims that are important are how the typewriter changed the way Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. His friend, a composer, noticed this change. “His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic.” This friend had noticed this about himself and wrote to Nietzsche in a letter that the “thoughts” depend on the quality of pen and paper. The machine changed his arguments to aphorisms. I think that this claim is important because it illustrates how a relatively new technology can change someone in a very subtle way. Even a typewriter, a machine that only makes letters on paper with the push of a button, can change the way we think.
The second claim that I think is important is how past thinkers have predicted this change in mental abilities. These thinkers, however, predicted them with other things than computers and the internet. Plato contested against books claiming that “as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry in their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, ‘cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.’” Plato was afraid that writing would corrupt people’s minds to the point of uselessness. That is happening now except that it is not writing that is corrupting our minds, it is the internet. Another past thinker that predicted the corruption of minds was Italian humanist Hieronimo Squariciafico. He was afraid that the easy accessibility to books would make people’s minds lazy and weak.
I think these claims are crucial to what Carr is trying to say. However, I believe that our minds are changing to accommodate the new generation of technology. In one hundred years, some people might read this thinking that the same thing is happening to them. The way people think changes as time goes on. Eventually the change will become the norm of the society. Then another change will start happening. The cycle goes on. So with this I think that the change in the way we think is a good thing because it means that the human race is advancing technologically. As technology advances, the lives of some people get a little easier and better. Also, art forms such as music and paintings change. As generations go by, the art has changed. The change in the way we think marks the advancement of the human species.