Carr [Final Draft]

Gerald Lappay

RWS 100

Professor Werry

November 12, 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, author of “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Lives for the Better”, can considered an internet advocate -- then Nicholas Carr, author 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. With these rhetorical strategies, Carr intends to convince the reader that continuous use of the internet is a huge hindrance for the world of literacy and cognition –  the internet is the bane of readers and writers of long texts.  In this piece, I will analyze Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for strategies he uses to persuade his readers.

            Carr takes a moment the express his feelings towards the internet with clever use 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. Why Space Odyssey? Was it to get his readers to Google it? Or maybe it was a way to convey his feelings towards the internet in a clever way. If one thinks about it in the latter, it makes sense.

                        Over the past few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or                                     something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry …                               my mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the                              way I used to think … my mind would get caught up in the narrative, and I’d                           spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case                            anymore (Carr).

            At this point in the article, Carr doesn’t directly attribute these “uncomfortable senses” to the internet, yet. Carr then reveals his realization, the reason why his brain and his literacy have hit a wall.

                        For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online. The Web                              has been a godsend to me as a writer … Even when I’m not working; I’m likely                                   as not to be foraging in the Web’s information thickets … And what the Net                             seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and                                        contemplation. I was once a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the                              surface like a guy on a Jet Ski (Carr).

            Scuba diving is relatively slow-paced, requires plenty of training, and is a visually stunning experience. On the other hand, jet-skiing is fast, requires very little training, and is rather showy. Simply looking over the metaphor, Carr could be comparing his pace of reading using scuba diving and jet-skiing, the former relative to slowly absorbing information and the latter to speeding and skimming all around.

            By combining 2001: Space Odyssey and his scuba diver to Jet Ski metaphor, Carr is trying to develop an emotional connection with the reader, an attempt at the Aristotelean appeal of Pathos. By describing how his reading habits have changed over his prolonged use of the internet over the span of a few years, Carr is trying to get the reader to [possibly] come to the same realization that maybe the internet has indeed negatively affected cognitive function. Once the reader has come to that realization, Carr has successfully connected to the reader on an emotional level. Provided that The Atlantic’s main demographic is that of educated readers and writers, it is possible that their minds too have lost the same capacity for concentration as Carr had.

            Carr introduces 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).

While the typewriter helped Nietzsche, it also hurt his writing style. Carr identifies Nietzsche and the typewriter as an example of new technology which had affected cognitive function. While Nietzsche’s change of writing style isn’t exactly negative, it’s the idea that there was a cognitive change due to new technology that Carr wanted to highlight. With this, Carr has introduced evidence that the internet isn’t the only piece of technology that has impaired some form of literacy, in this case, writing. It’s happened in the past, and to prove it, Carr introduced the historical evidence.

            Past films and philosophers aside, Carr also has some time-relevant evidence to offer in “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. Carr cites (and hyperlinks) a study of online research habits conducted by scholars from University College London. “As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of two popular research sites, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of information” (Carr). The University’s study led to the conclusion that the research sites’ visitors showed activity collectively known as “skimming”, which is to read something quickly and take note only on the things the reader finds important. “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 and Maryanne Wolf, a development psychologist at Tufts University, criticize skimming, calling it “a style of reading that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, [which] 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). Wolf claims that our interpretations of texts may have been affected by the use of the internet. “Our ability to interpret texts … remains largely disengaged” (Carr). By citing a study which observed internet users’ reading habits and seeking professional opinion on them, Carr attempts to establish the fact that the internet is altering cognitive function in literacy and prose. Before introducing Wolf and the University’s study, Carr has been establishing this fact in the form of historical evidence and personal accounts. Now armed with relevant evidence, Carr uses it to further prove his main argument.

            But, there are issues with University College London’s conclusions and Wolf’s accusations on skimming. The first issue is with the test subjects of the study. Carr’s summary of the study does not include the common demographic of the research sites’ visitors. Research sites are typically used by many different people, ranging from middle school to college students and further extend to those with doctorates. Because of this, the data on the sample group and their perusing habits can become skewed. If Carr included more information about the University’s study group, say it focused on people in the 18 to 35 age group (which would also be about the same age range as a good portion of Carr’s readers), Carr could have made much stronger arguments about the discovered skimming habits and the reader may be more convinced because the arguments are even more relevant to the reader. The second issue regards Wolf’s bashing on the idea of skimming. Much of today’s writing comes in the form of [semi] professional research papers and other pieces which involve sampling other work. For a writer, it’s not very common to read a text from start to finish identifying an idea they’d like to work with. It takes too much time, and efficiency, which Wolf does note. But in a world with due dates and time constraints, it’s too expensive in a sense to give up efficiency. While Wolf does make some valid points, the idea of “efficiency and immediacy” shouldn’t directly relate to a decrease in cognitive function.

            Overall, Carr did not convince me. While he did strive to introduce evidence new and old, his motives behind including them in “Is Google Is Making Us Stupid” can be unclear. Also, some of his evidence had noticeable holes which can lead to questions and a decline in credibility. While we might be doing a lot more skimming, we’re also doing a lot more writing. In my introduction, I highlighted Clive Thompson, who I described as an “internet advocate”. Summarizing the first part of his book, “Smarter Than You Think”, Thompson concludes people in this generation are doing a lot of writing. While some of it might be utter garbage, it’s still writing. And I believe that this increase in writing, which arguably could lead to an increase in cognitive function, outweighs this decrease in cognitive function that Carr tries to identify because of prolonged internet use.