"Google and the media"

Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” discusses the effect that reading on the internet can have on us. He claims that people have found that over the past few years, as the internet has taken over the world, people tend to think in a different way. Their reading skills have started to change and decline. Once able to read hundreds of pages at a time, people now find it difficult to tackle a five-page article. Deep, critical thinking is becoming a struggle. The internet does have its many positives. It enables people to do research in a much more efficient and quick way than they used to in a library. What used to take up to days now can be found within minutes. But this causes the brain to think differently. People think in a quick and swift manner, like the internet, instead of contemplating ideas. The internet makes it very difficult for people to concentrate on reading material like they used to. Instead of reading full articles, people tend to skim a paragraph here and there to get “the gist of it”. Carr brings Friedrich Nietzsche to strengthen this point. Nietzsche bought a typewriter in 1882. It was told that his style of writing had changed based on the instrument he used to write. Carr goes on to say that the internet is taking over every aspect of our lives. It has become our map, clock, printing press, typewriter, calculator, phone, radio, and TV. Media must change with the way we live today. They are learning that they must change with the times. Therefore, newspapers cut their articles short and have a page where the reader can catch a glimpse of what is happening in the world today without having to actually read the whole article. Google was created as a means to have all the information that one needs right at their finger-tips. Founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are under the assumption that we would all be better-off if our brains contained every piece of information, through artificial intelligence. This is very unsettling. This idea suggests that our brains just need to be “tweeked” so they can work better and faster. The more we train our brains to rely on media and the internet, the more we are flattening our brains and minimizing the amount of thought we can achieve.
Chris Hedge’s article “The Internet is no Substitute for the Dying Newspaper Industry” discusses the reasons for the decline of the newspaper industry. He argues that the internet is not the cause of this decline. Hedge says that the real reason is that people today do not have as big of an interest in literature in general. He believes that destroying traditional news is bad for society today. He says that the decline will make us dumb and that we need it in order to stay educated. Hedge blames the decline on us, today’s society.
I personally enjoyed reading the first article. I think that while Carr’s argument states that people don’t have the stamina to sit and read a long article nowadays, he wrote this long article and expect people to read it through. I found a lot of what he said about the media to be true. If you look around the city, everyone is on their phones, which are mostly connected to the internet, which contain calculators, maps, etc. It is definitely true that people will not read long articles like they used to find interesting. I think this can also relate to the fast-moving world we live in today. It’s just the way of society.