Carr Rough Draft

Ally Ferrell

November 14, 2014

RWS 100

Professor Werry

Is Google Making Us Stupid Essay

Today, we have access to technology at just the tip of our fingers. Instead of going to the library and researching from books and journals, we are able to type in any question into Google and almost instantly have thousands of results.  My instinctive thought, along with many others', is that this technology and access to knowledge would actually improve how we think and the amount we learn. However, some claim that the advancement of technology has actually changed the way people think in a negative way. Nicholas Carr, a columnist and author who focuses on the affect of technology on our mentality, agrees with the latter. In Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, he claims that the extreme use and reliance of the internet has deteriorated people’s overall cognitive behavior. He believes that people have smaller attention spans and worsened critical thinking and reading skills. In this essay I will examine the rhetorical strategies Carr uses in his article, ethos, metaphors, and prolepsis. I will show how they support his argument, why he chooses the particular strategy and examine the overall effectiveness of support to his main claim of one of his strategies. 

One of the rhetorical strategies that Carr uses to help convince the reader of his argument is the Aristotelian appeals, ethos. Ethos is used to give credibility to the author. Carr states in the beginning of his article, “immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy” and “for more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing”(58). This gives Carr credibility because it shows that he has actually experienced what he is writing about. He shows that he is a literary type and has used the internet often in the past decade. These two things are the main components of his claim. It’s hard to believe an author when he or she is talking about something that has never happened to them. He says that he is the literary type because if he just said that he uses the internet and can’t stay focused, there would be nothing to compare it to and his attention deficit could have easily been present before the internet use. By saying that this phenomenon has happened to him, he is far less likely to sound like it is just the "selfie generation" that isn't as advanced as previous generations and possibly offend the younger generations. I think that this strategy could have been much more effective in helping him support his claim. The magazine this article was posted in, The Atlantic, has a demographic of older people in the same generation as Carr. Throughout the essay, Carr uses sources and examples that are more relevant to the older generations.  It is unlikely that someone in their teens or early 20s would be reading this magazine. Also, he gives plenty of other examples of his friends and other people who have had the same effect from the internet, his personal example does not make much of a difference. I think that Carr would've developed a better credibility if he had talked more about his previous research,works, and his experience on the subject of the affect of the internet.

Another strategy that Carr uses is a metaphor. He compares the famous movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey” to present day. Carr quotes the movie when the character Dave takes apart HAL, the computer that runs the spaceship and has killed his crew mates. Carr quotes, “ ‘Dave,stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?’ So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. ‘Dave, my mind is going,’ HAL says forlornly. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it.’ I can feel it, too. 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, reprogramming the memory”(Carr p 58). Carr uses the disassembling of the computer’s memory as a metaphor to the disintegration of his and everyone elses’ memories due to technology. Carr chooses words such as “tinkering”, “circuitry”, and “reprogramming”. This word choice suggests that Carr feels like a robot. HAL, contrary to humans, was chained to a wall and could not stop his own disassembly. However, us humans have more control than that, or do we. This metaphor shows that Carr feels as though we are helpless to this change, just as HAL was. We have become addicted to the internet and the technology that we have such easy access to often at the end of our fingertips. 

Another way Carr attempts to convince his readers is his use of the strategy prolepsis. Prolepsis is the acknowledgement of a popular counterargument and addressing why it is wrong. This is necessary so that readers are not as easily able to tear apart an argument. If an author fails to bring up a common contrary belief, the readers may assume that he or she has not done research or just ignores others’ opinions. Carr says “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s… but it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking”(Carr p 60). Carr is bringing up the argument that since we are reading more than ever, we are thinking more and better. This argument can be seen in Clive Thompson’s popular article Public Thinking, which basically claims the exact opposite of Carr. If Carr had not brought this up, readers who may have read Thompson’s article or come up with the idea themselves would just assume that Carr completely missed that idea. By acknowledging it, he is able to show why he believes it is not true and give evidence for that. Although, Carr does bring up a part of Thompson’s counterargument, he doesn't bring up all of it. Thompson claims that the internet has improved are thinking because we are writing for the public more rather than reading more. Carr not bringing this up makes it seem like he’s just ignoring it because he does not have sufficient evidence to show why it is wrong.

In conclusion, Carr uses many strategies in his article in order to convince the reader, even though some of them may not be as effective as he thought. Because I am in the generation that grew up with constant access to the internet, it is difficult for me to tell how the internet has affected my thinking because I have nothing previous to compare it to. I personally am able to read long books but also get deferred from pages on my iPhone due to distractions. I think that Carr has a valid point, but the total effect the internet has depends on the impressionability of the person and is not as detrimental as Carr makes it out to be.