Is Google Making Us Stupid & Illiterate?

          I believe that Carr believes that Google is not necessarily “making us stupid” but it is definitely lowering a certain aspect of our intelligence. Carr says that the way the Internet is set up it is subconsciously making us skim through things rather than read something fully and then move on. There are so many different ads or links on a website that it is hard to focus on one thing. If you are reading The New York Times online you might be reading an article and another headline in the margin pops up and diverts your attention. Carr makes a comparison regarding this: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski”. With this comparison, I believe that Carr also wants to make the point that we used to read lengthy books but now we read short online articles. The Internet, Google especially, has focused are attention on a more picture-based intelligence. Hedge also refers to this picture-based intelligence by saying that “images and slogans are all [the less literate population] understand”.  Hedge portrays a somewhat depressing picture of our nation today by showing how the illiterate portion of our population cannot actually understand enough to do with bank loans, mortgages, taxes, or even voting for a president that could help their situation. Because they cannot understand forms and contracts their houses are being foreclosed and they are becoming bankrupt. I also liked how Hedge pointed out that the presidents do not need to be as intelligent as they used to be; they just have to seem intelligent.

            In Carr’s article he quotes one of the men who co-founded Google: “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off”. To me, this definitely does not seem like the right solution. Would we always have this knowledge or would we have to earn it? Do we have to learn the basic skills and then we attain this knowledge or do we have to graduate high school or college to get all of this information? Similar to Carr’s argument, I think that if this were the case today, if we all had a computer for a brain, we would become less intelligent. If we had all the knowledge of the world in our brains we wouldn’t have the need to be curious; we wouldn’t want to travel the world; we wouldn’t need to read anything. Also, I think that all that information would lower the need for human interactions and our world would start to look more like the world in the movie “Wall-E”.