Paper 3 Draft 1 (1 intro 2 bodies)

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

November 3, 2014

[Insert Title Later]

            The internet can be considered the printing press of our generation. Like the printing press, there were skeptics and advocates – each with their own beliefs that the invention could help or hurt the future. If Clive Thompson, writer of “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Lives for the Better”, can considered an internet advocate -- then Nicholas Carr, writer of the book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” and The Atlantic Article “Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Alternatively, “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?)” can be considered an internet skeptic. Carr, who studied at prestigious higher-education institutes such as Dartmouth and Harvard, is one of the big-names of internet skeptics. Both his book and The Atlantic article have been wide topics of discussion regarding the internet’s impact on this generation. In this piece, I will analyze Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for strategies he uses to persuade his readers.

            About three-quarters into “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Carr begins to address his skeptics. “Yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism … the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different” (Carr). Besides directly addressing his skeptics, Carr conveys his emotions to the reader in different ways. Particularly, he compares his feelings towards the internet to that of the 1960’s “classic” 2001: Space Odyssey. Carr claims that his frequent use of the internet messes up his brain how Dave messed up HAL’s circuitry, ultimately shutting HAL down. “ Carr uses 2001: Space Odyssey in both his opening and closing. This could refer to the Aristotelian appeal to Pathos – the way a writer conveys his/her feelings to get a point across to the reader. While several appeals to pathos are present in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, the pathos appeals via 2001: Space Odyssey are quite hard to miss, since they’re very prevalent in this article. While I’m relatively uncultured when it comes to movies from the 1960s, I’m certain that these appeals to pathos are quite effective when it comes to reaching to the reader. In a way, the reader understands Carr’s feelings and sympathizes with them – to an extent. If I knew more about this film, chances are I would sympathize with Carr’s feelings even more.

            Nietzsche, a German philosopher whose ideals were adopted by Nazis, is a topic of discussion in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. Carr goes about Nietzsche’s use of the typewriter.

                        But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a                             composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had                          become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument                            even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own                            work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen                            and paper” (Carr).

Carr denotes the changes in Nietzsche’s writing style, all because of the change to a new piece of technology. While it helped Nietzsche to write again, it also hurt his writing style. This kind of identification was a strong way of getting his point across to the reader. While it’s not the internet, I did mention before that in a way, the internet is like today’s typewriter.