Google response

After reading Carr’s article, “Is Google making us stupider,” I must disagree with most of his arguments. First of all, no one and nothing can “make” you do anything. You choose to do everything. Weather that means choosing to read an article less closely or “bouncing” from site to site, it is all up to you how deep you look into a certain text. In the article, Carr quotes Bruce Friedman, who said, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” I however think this claim in context is completely absurd. What I mean is that although this may be true, it is not the internets fault that this man has lost this ability. If he truly wanted to “read and absorb” and article, he just has to be willing to do it. The fact that the internet has made information available to us within just a few seconds makes us think that we don’t need to really learn the information, because the it’s saved into cyberspace. However just because we don’t necessarily need to retain this information is not making us any dumber. After all, we’re the ones who choose not to thoroughly read the article, or who choose to “bounce” around web pages.

Friedman continues to say, “Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” To me this statement seems ridiculous. I don’t think it has anything to do with the internet that this man doesn’t read articles deeply anymore. To me it just sounds like he’s lazy.

Another thing I didn’t like about the article was how much it generalized. “When we read online…our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.” First of all, this article is online and I’m pretty sure all of Mr. Dominguez’s AP Literature classes read it. Now how deeply they read it is a different story, but they must have read it deep enough to write a 300 word response to it. So just in doing this assignment I think we’ve proven this claim to be false. Sure, it may be true some people have lost that ability, but to claim that “we” as an entire group have lost the ability is not true.