"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Abstract

We want to get straight to the point, don't get into all of the details if it's not necessary. We don't have time to sit down and read a whole page, when all we need is a couple of the sentences in the paragraph anyway. As Carr said "My mind isn't going...but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think....Immersing myself in a lengthy article used to be easy....That's rarely the case anymore." People rarely have time anymore to sit down and read long articles and lengthy research- so Google shortens the reading time, readers get the information they need and bam, they're done. That's it, next article. A con about all this agility and impatience, is that the readers are not able to stay on one article for a long time without being distracted- hyperlinks to other websites, pop-ups and ads. All of these barriers block us from staying focused on one thing, and one thing only. Google has influenced other traditional media as well. "Traditional media has to adapt to the audience's new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazine and newspapers shorten their articles..." Readers do not want to be bothered having to read everything, when they could be doing other things, and only want the main point anyway. This, in result, is turning us robot-like. We don't have our own ideas, we just take from the Internet because the information is readily at our fingertips. "As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence." Carr believes we're getting so stupid, that we can't even see that artificial intelligence is becoming more intelligent than us humans. Think about it...