reading response #5

Nick Carr’s central claim in the article “Is Google Making us Stupid?” is questioning how much technology is changing the way that anyone it contacts thinks. One of the subsequent claims that Carr makes that I think is most important is when he talks about how he noticed reading online articles has changed the way his mind functions and the loss of focus that he noticed as a result of this. For me growing up with the internet at my disposal pretty much all of my life my brain doesn’t work any other way so when he describes that situation I cant really relate, but when he stated “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” I immediately felt that connection with him. All my life I Have struggled to read or write for extended periods of time and I am pretty much fidgety all the time and it just worsens when I do so. After reading the article a little more I noticed how long it was and couldn’t finish reading the rest without being distracted by the usual phone music and t.v. One of the other claims I saw to be important was when he talked about the Philadelphia steel company and where Fredrick Winslow Taylor used a stop watch to time out how long it took to do different tasks in the work place and create a system of more efficient workers and believe that Taylors system is still very much with us. I believe that the idea of Taylors stop-watched system is still with us today but for the most part machines replace humans in most manufacturing companies such as a steel factory. One of the places where tailors system has a direct correlation is at fast food restaurants. If you go into mcdonalds and look about the drive through window there is a timer that is counting down orders and my friend (who worked in a mcdonalds) said nothing really happens except for an annoying sound. I think one of his more subtle unnoticed for how controversial claims Carr sneaks in is when he talks about how google is trying to collect all of the information in the world and portray the most relevant answer to its users and at the very last second he states is “The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.” Which is controversial because first he cannot just say that the last thing that these (google, yahoo, bing etc.) Companies don’t encourage leisurely and slow concentrated thoughts. Maybe they are trying to speed up the process like Taylor did with the steel industry to create a more efficient thought procces?