Blog #7 "Is Google Making Us Stupid"

Nicholas Carr takes a serious look at how the Internet effects our daily lives in his essay, Is Google Making Us Stupid.  He examines how we receive information now vs. how we used to receive information before the Net.  How we used to have to go to the Library to do research that took hours and now, within a few minutes we can find numerous amounts of information just by clicking a link.  The vast difference of digging into a book and retain the information, to now simply having to type it into the browser.  Our computers are doing the thinking for us by gather the snippets of information collected by our browsing history.  He takes a look at how different the Net is today vs 15 years ago.  We do everything on the Net, from watching TV to reading emails and researching our papers.  Carr has many examples of different technologies through history and the effects it had on society.  From the wristwatch to the printing press.  These technologies revolutionized the world in many ways and also set us back too.  Carr looks at how the future is unfolding in ways that may or may not be good for us.  However, Carr can not predict how it will effect us good or bad.  Carr touches on the fact that we will soon be able to connect our minds directly to computers creating a type of artificial intelligence.  In an age where technology is moving at speeds faster than our minds can possibly keep up, it is an intriguing idea to connect our brains to the Net and download information directly.  Or are our minds just as complex as a motherboard and able to adjust to our complex world of information?