I need a thesis for a single source essay on Carr’s article: “Is Google Making Us Stupid.” What would an outline look like for this essay?

Nicholas Carr is an American writer. He basically writes books based on technology, business and culture. Technological revolution has become a source of worry for everyone. Carr specializes in writing about the technological revolution and its effect on mankind. He wrote the article “Is Google making us stupid” which was published in the American magazine ‘The Atlantic’.  In this article, Carr tries to explain the diminishing intellectual ability of human beings due to over exposure to the internet. According to him, we are not able to use our thinking capabilities any more and are growing less patient towards reading because of internet.

Carr sights an example to prove his theory. He quotes the words of a character named ‘Hal’ in the movie “2001: Space Odyssey.” Hal is a supercomputer and when its maker, a human being is demolishing it by removing the wiring, Hal laments that his mind is going and that he can feel it. Carr likens our mind to ‘Hal’ and feels that human being is destroying himself by killing his own mind.  Car feels that someone is brain washing him and redeveloping his brain by installing a new wiring system. He worries about the degradation of critical thinking and decreased concentration in human beings. We place our trust completely on the internet and turn to ‘Google’ for all our answers. Previously, human beings used to find answers on their own by deep contemplation. But nowadays, whenever we face any questions we automatically use ‘Google’ to find answers, as we feel that ‘Google’ is always right.  

Nowadays, writing in your own words has become a thing of past. We search the net and find words, sentences and even grammatical suggestions on Google and other search engines. When the internet was not invented, people use to search for information from books, consult experienced people and make extensive use of libraries. Those days information was not available at a click of a button, but still the people were very intelligent and knowledgeable. Nowadays, the internet has become like a vast ocean of information, which is easily obtained by minimal efforts. This is supposed to make us intelligent, but on the contrary we are becoming less intelligent because our attention span has decreased significantly and therefore, we are not able to process so much information. Carr ponders “Is Google making us stupid.” We should also question ourselves because even though we are getting so much information from the net, our reading has decreased. The sad thing is that although multitude of  information is available, we all just thrive for the current writings and end up reading the same thing.

We are showered with so much information and many books are available online. But due to our declining reading habit, we choose a book, read its gist and we are done with it. Hyperlinks also tend to reduce our work by providing reference just by tapping on the link and thus we can visit many sites. This makes us more lazy.  

Is ‘Google’ really making us lazy? or is it just an excuse for us to become lazy? Agreed, that human beings in modern times favor shortcuts and are always inclined towards leading life effortlessly. Google is addictive, as people rely hugely on technology. Students use calculators for solving mathematical problems, they search the net for making projects and assignments and thus forgo their creative thinking. Lack of mental stimulation like thinking and reading is making human beings dull, lethargic and impatient. Knowledge is becoming shallow and superficial.

It would be inappropriate to accuse only ‘Google’ for reducing the reading habit in humans. ‘Google’ unfolds a world of information, which cannot be found only in books. It constantly upgrades and thus provides recent updates in all fields. Other Google apps make life easier. A study was done by neuro-scientists at UCLA in 2009, in which they compared the Google searchers to others. who read books and found out that searching the net considerably increase the precision talent.

Anything in excess is bad for us. Relying heavily on Google or any other search engine without giving a thought first, can be avoided. Exercising control over the use of net and using our own creative thinking power will allow us to enjoy the benefits of Google, without rendering us stupid.  View comments (2)