Edited intro and body paragraphs

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. 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.  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.