Gerald Lappay
RWS 100
Professor Werry
November 9, 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.
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.
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.
For the
first few paragraphs of “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Carr’s main evidence is
in the form of anecdotes. They can be relatable, almost up to the point where
the writer is spelling out the reader’s life. While anecdotes are one of the
more popular ways of captivating a reader, they have a drawback: not everyone
can relate to anecdotes. What if the reader isn’t like Carr’s interviewee,
Bruce Friedman? Not all of Carr’s readers are pathologists and read “War and
Peace” for fun – so why should the reader care? But before the reader
completely dismisses Carr before getting a quarter into the article, Carr pulls
quite the rhetorical move. “Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still
await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will
provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition” (Carr).
Here, Carr is addressing his readers who aren’t Bruce Friedman – those who can’t
resonate with Carr’s anecdotal evidence.
This brief
use of prolepsis attempts to earn back the attention of the readers he may have
lost and introduce a new piece of evidence: a study performed by University
College London. Briefly put, the study observed trends of research website
visitors.
They found that people using the sites
exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping
from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.
They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out
to another site (Carr).
Carr generalizes this skimming
to ideas of “efficiency and immediacy above all else” and it “may be weakening
our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier
technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace
(Carr). But here’s an issue with this generalization: when it comes to this new
generation of writing, it’s not very commonplace to read a whole text in search
of an idea or piece of evidence – from start to finish at least. While efficiency
plays a role in this, it shouldn’t be immediately generalized into a negative
change in cognitive function. Unless of course, Carr read through the whole
study conducted by University College London, start to finish reaching said generalization,
which I personally doubt.
And that’s my main issue with “Is Google Making Us Stupid”.
Not everyone shares the same habits when using the Internet. You can’t
generalize the cognitive function someone who uses the internet for cat videos
and someone else who uses it for source material, because they’re using the
Internet for two separate reasons. I doubt there’s some kind of efficiency
factor when it comes to finding a cute cat video. It seems like one of Carr’s
main arguments is that Internet users are so hell-bent on efficiency that it’s
degrading cognitive function, and efficiency doesn’t apply to all aspects of
the internet.
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