I agree with Nicholas Carr’s argument that google is taking a toll on our attention spans. As a person who has grown up with straight-to-the-point information always at my fingertips, I too have trouble focusing on long pieces of writing. In fact, when I took a look at the length of this article, despite how interesting I thought the topic was, I let out a sigh at the fact that I had to read it all. In today’s world, the majority of society does not have the time, or concentration to sit down and really absorb and contemplate long pieces of writing; we’re all about quick, efficient and straightforward answers. As Carr points out, google leaves little place for actually thinking about things. “Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed”. This is very sad.

This article makes me wonder about the future. Carr did an interesting thing by mentioning all the doubts that society first had when a new form of writing came out. Socrates feared that writing would make people forgetful. Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that Gutenberg’s printing press, which would create easy availability of books, would result in intellectual laziness and make people less studious. Both men were correct in their arguments, but along with their detrimental predictions came beneficial aspects of these tools as well. Now we are here. Many people have doubts about the easily accessible information that the internet has come to provide us. Do the benefits of google outweigh the drawbacks of it? And at what point will the drawbacks of new writing technology permanently undermine people’s ability to think for themselves?

According to this article, the next step in technological development is inserting a search engine in our brains. This is definitely crossing the line. It seems to me that my peers, as well as Carr agree with me on that. But will the next few generations down the line think so?

The title of this article grabbed my attention. I thought that Carr presented each of his ideas with enough proof and definitely did his research before writing this. He did include a lot of examples of other people’s thoughts on the topic which was a bit overwhelming. I think the topic was really fascinating and has definitely left me thinking.