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Nicholas Carr is a well known and very educated author from The Atlantic Monthly. He has also been published in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. A couple of years ago Carr wrote an article titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains." His main purpose for this article was to educate his readers on how the Internet, or Google, is affecting our brains. Carr wants his readers to know that he believes that the Internet has a negative affect on the way we go about reading and functioning throughout the day. Throughout the article Carr uses his colleagues and his own experiences as supporting facts to his claim. Carr is hoping to reach out to anyone who uses the Internet or who has used the Internet in the past.

"Is Google Making us Stupid?" That is the question on everyones mind. According to Nicholas Carr Google is making us stupid. In fact he says that the internet is changing the way people read now days. He talks about how people skim through an article, and can't even read more than two pages of an article without feeling the urge to bounce to another site. Along with Carr saying that people read different, he also says that reading is no longer and instinctive skill for humans. He supports this claim by saying that we have to teach our minds how to translate symbolic characters we see into language we understand. With this information what that mean is that our brains can change. Our brains have the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.

Nicholas Carr has many good examples that support his theory, but he also has a lot of supports that really don't make sense. When Carr says "The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data processing machines.." He claims that our minds should be operating faster, like computers, but he continues to show support that that has nothing to do with his claim. His support suggests that companies such as Google want us to search the web faster and click on as many links as we can. He also says that these companies don't encourage us to read leisurely or anything that requires concentration or thought. However, earlier in his article he mentions that the internet is making our minds scattered and harder for us to concentrate over long periods of time, making the reading process slower, therefore contradicting his claim.
Another support that Carr had that was poor was when he said, "Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives-or exerted such broad influences over our thoughts-as the internet does today." This claim had no support at all. He continues to say that theres been little consideration of how it is reprogramming us. How can he say that the internet has played a huge role in our lives or that it has influenced our thoughts.

Nicholas Carr says "The internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition." He is making this statement with the only support from Alan Turing from 1936. That from almost 70 years ago. His outrageous claim has very little support, and no actual verification that this is actually true.

Although Nicholas Carr had some good and some bad supports for his argument, I think It was a good article to really make a person think. Although it was a good article, I am not completely sold that Google is really making us stupid. Because of Carr's unsatisfied claims it is hard to believe that Google or even the internet could be making us stupid. However I do believe that the internet is having an effect on us. Maybe not so much to be making us stupid, but it had definitely changed our world and the way people can get information almost instantly.

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