Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In this essay, Carr asserts that the Internet, rather than Google specifically or exclusively, is in the process of revolutionizing human consciousness and cognition. For Carr, this is a negative revolution that threatens to evacuate human intellectual inquiry of its nuance, and to squeeze human interactions with both complex ideas and our own intellectual lives into a dangerously oversimplified mechanism designed only to create productivity and efficiency: two things that he sees as antithetical to a robust intellectual life.

To more impactfully and poignantly mount his argument, he implicitly and explicitly likens the Internet to previously revolutionary technological developments—most saliently the printing press. By analogizing the Internet to its precursor—a much more widely studied technology whose impact has been broadly felt and experienced over centuries—Carr hopes to lend his argument more gravity and impact. At the time of the essay’s writing (and still today), we have not seen the full impact of the Internet on human civilization. Unlike the case of the printing press, whose invention hundreds of years ago has produced scholarship and scientific inquiry into the mechanisms of the brain in relation to reading, the Internet’s full influence and impact upon the brain and human civilization has not yet been studied or understood in full.

For Carr, this is not solely due to the technology’s newness, but to the overarching passivity with which it is accepted and employed. In Carr’s perspective, the omnipresent, passive acceptance of both the Internet and its conventions is dangerous. He enjoins the reader to pause the Internet zeitgeist for some good, old-fashioned contemplation—of the type that, ironically, the Internet is curtailing. He invites his reader to engage with his printed words (which, in another twist of irony, the reader may indeed be encountering online) to critique the role of the Internet both in their individual intellectual life and in society at large. He questions whether the Internet’s mandate of efficiency should be uncritically duplicated to rule over the life of the mind, and returns with a resounding “no” to his own provocation. For Carr, the mechanization and mandate to perpetually increase productivity and efficiency creates a flattened and empty intellectual life, devoid of the careful and nuanced intellectual inquiry that the written and printed word engenders.

Carr therefore asks the reader to be aware of how the Internet augments access to vast stores of human knowledge and to attend to the way it creates new paradigms for processing and understanding that knowledge. For Carr, human society has become too focused on the trees (i.e., the amount of information that the Internet makes available) to see the forest (i.e., the way the Internet metamorphoses our intellectual tendencies). The essay is therefore an intervention: a plea to pause the breakneck pace of the Internet and our social and intellectual acceptance of it. Carr fears that without this pause, too many people will passively allow the Internet to remodel their neural and intellectual pathways, leading to a broad social naturalization of the Internet’s artificial technology. 

To drive this point home, Carr highlights the technological precedent of the Internet: the printing press. The printing press unquestionably revolutionized human access to intellectual inquiry and information. Carr uses this self-evident truth to enjoin his reader to critique the Internet: If the printing press had such a huge impact on human society, then surely the Internet, which also produces radical access to vast amounts of information, will too. It is simply harder to attend to this impact while being caught up within it, rather than studying it from a scientific or historical perspective; that’s where Carr’s essay comes in. His comparison of the Internet to the printing press helps his reader take in the vastness of the Internet’s potential impact—and to seriously consider its impact upon our societies’ intellectual paradigms.