Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Nicholas Carr explores the effects and concerns of having a growing ease of obtaining the written word due to the internet in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid? One of the things Carr talks about is that he noticed that after having spent a lot of time on the internet, being used to the instant information, he was not able to concentrate on deep reading or long articles the way he used to. He says, “what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.”

When I read for fun, it takes me a while to get through a book, and it is because I will read in 30 or 45 minute blocks, and then move to something else. I know people who can read a novel in a weekend, but even when I was on a long flight to London, it was hard to keep my focus on a book for very long. Because I grew up with the internet, it is hard for me to judge whether or not it had an effect on my attention span, but to me it seems like it would have.

I like to get my news in headlines or a few sentences, rather than reading an entire page. And frequently when I am busy I like to just ask a question in a text instead of bothering with a long phone conversation. I feel like our whole society has evolved and gravitated towards quickness, and the internet was just another component in the evolution, not the sole cause of this change.

One good way to illustrate the attention spans of Americans through the last few decades is to go back and look at the popular films. Watching Citizen Kane in the year of its release was probably very thrilling and exciting, but compared to a film released today its pacing is very slow. Scenes during this time period were much longer than they are today, and there was generally one main storyline or problem. Today there are many montages, short shots and scenes, more characters, more camera angles during scenes, and possibly several different stories all at one time. To me this is proof that our attention spans have gradually gotten shorter as time goes by.

I don’t think the invention of the internet ruined our concentration, but I don’t think it helped either. Americans have been gradually loosing focus for decades, and maybe it is in part the result of our increasingly busy lives, and the need for quicker information the internet can provide us. It is convenient for many people, and getting used to this quickness also makes it harder to concentrate on long pieces of literature. Though I have no concrete answer, Carr asks a good question. Is Google Making Us Stupid?