"Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains!" (alternatively "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?") is a magazine article by technology writer Nicholas G. Carr, and is highly critical of the Internet's effect on cognition. It was published in the July/August 2008 edition of The Atlantic magazine as a six-page cover story. Carr's main argument is that the Internet might have detrimental effects on cognition that diminish the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Despite the title, the article is not specifically targeted at Google, but more at the cognitive impact of the Internet and World Wide Web. Carr expanded his argument in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a book published by W. W. Norton in June 2010.
The essay was extensively discussed in the media and the blogosphere, with reactions to Carr's argument being polarised. At the Britannica Blog, a part of the discussion focused on the apparent bias in Carr's argument toward literary reading. In Carr's view, reading on the Internet is generally a shallower form in comparison with reading from printed books in which he believes a more intense and sustained form of reading is exercised. Elsewhere in the media, the Internet's impact on memory retention was discussed; and, at the online scientific magazine Edge, several argued that it was ultimately the responsibility of individuals to monitor their Internet usage so that it does not impact their cognition.
While long-term psychological and neurological studies have yet to yield definitive results justifying Carr's argument, a few studies have provided glimpses into the changing cognitive habits of Internet users. A UCLA study led some to wonder whether a breadth of brain activity—which was shown to occur while users performed Internet searches in the study's functional MRI scans—actually facilitated reading and cognition or possibly overburdened the mind; and what quality of thought could be determined by the additional presence of brain activity in regions known to control decision-making and complex reasoning skills.
Background Prior to the publication of Carr's Atlantic essay, critics had long been concerned about the potential for electronic media to supplant literary reading. In 1994, American academic Sven Birkerts published a book titled The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, consisting of a collection of essays that declaimed against the declining influence of literary culture—the tastes in literature that are favored by a social group—with a central premise among the essays asserting that alternative delivery formats for the book are inferior to the paper incarnation. Birkerts was spurred to write the book after his experience with a class he taught in the fall of 1992, where the students had little appreciation for the literature he had assigned them, stemming from, in his opinion, their inaptitude for the variety of skills involved in deep reading. In "Perseus Unbound", an essay from the book, Birkerts presented several reservations toward the application of interactive technologies to educational instruction, cautioning that the "long-term cognitive effects of these new processes of data absorption" were unknown and that they could yield "an expansion of the short-term memory banks and a correlative atrophying of long-term memory".
In 2007, developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf took up the cause of defending reading and print culture in her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, approaching the subject matter from a scientific angle in contrast to Birkerts' cultural-historical angle. A few reviewers were critical of Wolf for only touching upon the Internet's potential impact on reading in her book; however, in essays published concurrent with the book's release she elaborated upon her worries. In an essay in The Boston Globe, Wolf expressed her grave concern that the development of knowledge in children who are heavy users of the Internet could produce mere "decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their googled universes", and cautioned that the web's "immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge". In an essay published by Powell's Books, Wolf contended that some of the reading brain's strengths could be lost in future generations "if children are not taught first to read, and to think deeply about their reading, and only then to e-read". Preferring to maintain an academic perspective, Wolf firmly asserted that her speculations have not yet been scientifically verified but deserved serious study.
In Carr's 2008 book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, the material in the final chapter, "iGod", provided a basis for his later Atlantic magazine article titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The inspiration to write "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" came from the difficulties Carr found he had in remaining engaged with not only books he had to read but even books that he found very interesting. This is sometimes called deep reading, a term coined by academic Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies and later defined by developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf with an added cognitive connotation.
Synopsis "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" is a 2008 article written by technologist Nicholas Carr for The Atlantic, and later expanded on in a published edition by W. W. Norton. The book investigates the cognitive effects of technological advancements that relegate certain cognitive activities—namely, knowledge-searching—to external computational devices. The book received mainstream recognition for interrogating the assumptions people make about technological change and advocating for a component of personal accountability in one's relationships to devices.
Carr begins the essay by saying that his recent problems with concentrating on reading lengthy texts, including the books and articles that he used to read effortlessly, stem from spending too much time on the Internet. He suggests that constantly using the Internet might reduce one's ability to concentrate and reflect on content. He introduces a few anecdotes taken from bloggers who write about the transformation in their reading and writing habits over time. In addition, he analyzes a 2008 study by University College London about new "types" of reading that will emerge and become predominant in the information age. He particularly refers to the work of Maryanne Wolf, a reading behavior scholar, which includes theories about the role of technology and media in learning how to write new languages. Carr argues that while speech is an innate ability that stems directly from brain structure, reading is conscious and taught. He acknowledges that this theory has a paucity of evidence so far, but refers to such works as Wolf's Proust and the Squid, which discusses how the brain's neurons adapt to a creature's environmental demands to become literate in new problem areas. The Internet, in his opinion, is just another kind of environment that people will uniquely adapt to.
Carr discusses how concentration might be impaired by Internet usage. He references the historical example of Nietzsche, who used a typewriter, which was new during his time in the 1880s. Allegedly, Nietzsche's writing style changed after the advent of the typewriter. Carr categorizes this example as demonstrative of neuroplasticity, a scientific theory that states neural circuits are contingent and in flux. He invokes the idea of sociologist Daniel Bell that technologies extend human cognition, arguing that humans unconsciously conform to the very qualities, or kinds of patterns, involved in these devices' functions. He uses the clock as an example of a device that has both improved and regulated human perception and behavior.
Carr argues that the Internet is changing behavior at unprecedented levels because it is one of the most pervasive and life-altering technologies in human history. He suggests that the Internet engenders cognitive distractions in the form of ads and popups. These concentration-altering events are only worsened by online media as they adapt their strategies and visual forms to those of Internet platforms to seem more legitimate and trick the viewer into processing them.
Carr also posits that people's ability to concentrate might decrease as new algorithms free them from knowledge work; that is, the process of manipulating and synthesizing abstract information into new concepts and conclusions. He compares the Internet with industrial management systems, tracing how they caused workers to complain that they felt like automata after the implementation of Taylorist management workflows. He compares this example with the modern example of Google, which places its computer engineers and designers into a systematized knowledge environment, creating robust insights and results at the expense of creativity. Additionally, Carr argues that the Internet makes its money mainly by exploiting users' privacy or bombarding them with overstimulation, a vicious cycle where companies facilitate mindless browsing instead of rewarding sustained thinking.
Carr ends his essay by tracing the roots of the skeptic trend. He discusses events where people were wary about new technologies, including Socrates's skepticism about the use of written language and a fifteenth-century Italian editor's concern about the shift from manually written to printed works. All of these technologies indelibly changed human cognition, but also led to mind-opening innovations that endure today. Still, Carr concludes his argument on an ambivalent note, citing a quote by Richard Foreman that laments the erosion of educated and articulate people. Though Google and other knowledge-finding and knowledge-building technologies might speed up existing human computational processes, they might also foreclose the human potential to easily create new knowledge.
Reception We can expect … that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works. — Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?".
Carr's essay was widely discussed in the media both critically and in passing. While English technology writer Bill Thompson observed that Carr's argument had "succeeded in provoking a wide-ranging debate", Damon Darlin of The New York Times quipped that even though "[everyone] has been talking about [the] article in The Atlantic magazine", only "[s]ome subset of that group has actually read the 4,175-word article, by Nicholas Carr." The controversial online responses to Carr's essay were, according to Chicago Tribune critic Steve Johnson, partly the outcome of the essay's title "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", a question that the article proper does not actually pose and that he believed was "perfect fodder for a 'don't-be-ridiculous' blog post". Johnson challenged his readers to carefully consider their online responses in the interest of raising the quality of debate.
Many critics discussed the merits of Carr's essay at great length in forums set up formally for this purpose at online hubs such as the Britannica Blog and publisher John Brockman's online scientific magazine Edge, where the roster of names quickly took on the semblance of a Who's Who of the day's Internet critics. Calling it "the great digital literacy debate", British-American entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen judged the victor to be the American reader, who has a wide range of compelling writing from "all of America's most articulate Internet luminaries".