24 pages • 48 minutes read
Nicholas CarrIs Google Making Us Stupid?
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key FiguresCharacter Analysis
Nicholas Carr
Carr is a celebrated scholar who focuses on technology, economics, and cultural studies. He expanded this essay’s argument in a 2010 book entitled The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He also authored the 2014 book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, which, according to his author website, “examines the personal and social consequences of our ever growing dependency on computers, robots, and apps.” Carr has carved out a place for himself as a thoughtful critic of the Internet age. All his works invite the reader to put a healthy amount of critical distance between themselves and the technology of the virtual age, instead of merely passively accepting these revolutionary and hugely individually- and socially-impactful technological developments.
Maryanne Wolf
According to her personal website, “Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, a teacher, and an advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the Director of the newly created Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.” She and her work Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain are important references within Carr’s essay. Wolf’s assertion that “We are how we read” is hugely important to Carr’s as he argues that we should attend to what the Internet gives us in terms of reading material and how the Internet reshapes our process of reading, and thereby reshapes our conceptions of ourselves. Carr appeals to both Wolf’s authority and her scholarship to lend his own argument more gravity and credence.
Frederick Winslow Taylor
Taylor (1856-1915) is, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, an “American inventor and engineer who is known as the father of scientific management. His system of industrial management has influenced the development of virtually every country enjoying the benefits of modern industry.” In “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr carefully parses Taylor’s influence upon industrial practices, emphasizing that, while Taylor’s systems did wildly increase productivity and efficiency, it made workers feel like automatons. Carr then argues that the Internet has extended Taylor’s mechanizing system to the life of the mind. Through this progression, Carr implicitly argues that the Internet is inappropriately mechanizing human intellectual inquiry and the neural pathways of the brain—impoverishing the space for contemplation and nuance that the printed word engenders, and changing intellectual inquiry into a flattened and mechanized process centered on efficiency. Carr’s rhetorical strategy of invoking Taylor is a powerful one, as the man’s influence has undoubtedly shaped so much of human industrial society. Carr asks us to attend to something that can and will have just as much influence—the Internet—by asking us to consider the impact of Taylor’s system as an analog for the impact of the Internet.
