Stupidity, Impatience,...or Neither?

[Just as a kind of side note: I found it extremely ironic that before I knew what the article was going to discuss, I checked the length of the article and started to skim, until I noticed that the focus of the article was about how our reading habits have been spoiled in this way by the internet…]

From what I gathered from the article ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’, Nicholas Carr doesn’t necessarily think that “Google” (or the internet in general) is making us stupid, but perhaps that it is changing everything about the way we think. Possibly the internet's immediacy and availability of information has simply spoiled us to the point where we can't wait to read an entire article thats more than a page long. Carr seemed to kind of present both the positive and negative effects of this change internet has caused on our methods of reading. In some parts, he made it sound as though literature was being ruined – “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” Carr also told of a blogger, Scott Karp, who admitted that he doesn’t even read books anymore.

Though he mainly portrayed the internet as a negative influence on our reading skills, he seemed to make a few points that could be considered positive changes to our methods of reading. When he compared the change technology is causing today to the change that the written word had in Socrates’ time it seemed that he was suggesting that maybe we just haven’t seen the benefits of the changes in our reading habits, like Socrates didn’t see the advantages of written word.

Our class’ internet habits seemed to play into Carr’s point that we have a very short attention span when reading and hardly any critical thinking goes into our readings, especially on the internet. Many of us had many tabs and windows open at once, doing multiple things by jumping back and forth through webpages. This relates to Carr’s idea that the internet has become a means to “scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.”