Gerald Lappay
RWS 100
Professor Werry
November 6, 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. While he commends the internet for its wide variety of uses,
he also criticizes it for its harmful effects – provided one uses it for a long
period of time. These harmful effects aren’t life-threatening. According to
Carr, the internet impairs ones cognitive ability, and other quality-of-life
functions; and in order to make his case, Carr uses several rhetorical
strategies ranging from events in history to personal accounts. 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.
Carr
spends a few paragraphs on Nietzsche, a German philosopher whose ideals were
adopted by the Nazi regime. In Nietzsche’s time [the 1860s], the typewriter was
a relatively new invention. Nietzsche struggled with hand cramps, and as such
adopted the typewriter as his new medium to continue publishing philosophical
texts.
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. Carr’s purpose in identifying
Nietzsche and his typewriter issues was to 1) connect the typewriter to the
internet, as both were relatively new technology in their respective times and
2) show the reader that the internet wasn’t the only piece of technology to
affect function.
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