Nicholas Carr: "Is Google Making us Stupid?"

Nicholas Carr starts off his essay by examining how the habits of concentrations has started to change over the decades. Many years ago he would be able to easily immerse himself into a book or lengthy article , spending hours at a time trying to understand a text. However, nowadays he feels that his concentration is not as good as it used to be, drifting after about two or three pages, looking for something else to do. He also talks to some of his friends, and they too are struggling with the same problem. He infers that research on the Web (Google search) is now done in nearly minutes, as it used to take days looking through books. He says "the more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focussed on a long piece of writing". Researches have found that we are now seeing a change in the way we read and think.  They say that "our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged." Meaning that we are not engaging in texts enough, simply reading summaries and easy-to-browse information, and it is effecting the way we think. Google is "really trying to build an artificial intelligence and do it on a large scale". This suggests that Google's economic interest is puting intelligence under the rug and driving us to distraction.

While it is true that we rely on computers to "mediate our understanding of the world" and our intelligence is "flattened into artificial inteligence", the internet is also exrtemely helpful. The Internet helps society keep up with the fast pace current society. It is also very benificial giving us tons of information right at our fingertips. However, we should not simply listen to the Internet and all of its teachings, but we should expierience many things as well. Just as the narrator in 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" by Walt Whitman expierinced nature for himself instead of only listening to the professer; we should also experience things ourself, not simply relying on the Internet.

Question: How do you think this will effect life in say 200 years?